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by giobox 2726 days ago
I'm not entirely convinced the UK/NHS should ever be used as a good example for handling medical notes, at least by today's standards.

As a Brit who left the UK a while ago, I recently had cause to request my "medical records" from my former GP. Of course such data can presumably be requested via the UK's Data Protection Act, but the lack of any kind of standard process or checks really shocked me, given the care they are treated with in places such as the US via specific legislation such as HIPPA and so forth.

My GP posted my entire history after one phone call to their receptionist via Skype, did no checks what so ever on my identity beyond confirming my name and DoB to look me up, I was left close to speechless following the call. I can't profess to be an expert on the topic of rights to medical data in the UK, but the above was true of my own experience and others I know, I've heard similar stories from a handful of GP friends and family. There is literally nothing stopping someone pulling your name and DoB from a Facebook account or similar and doing the same in many cases.

The number of GPs without electronic record keeping of any kind in the UK frankly amazes me as well, supposedly the NHS will be paperless by 2020...

3 comments

Don’t worry, US medical practices will give you a big show about doing anything in the name of HIPPA.

Rest assured, it is a show, and most of your information is fed in real time to a half dozen different entities whom you have never heard of. The people who sell prescription data provide it to the pharma company before your insurer even gets the claim.

Is the data anonymized when they send it? And is there anything I can read about this practice further? Not trying to challenge you, just curious.
Is what they're doing illegal or is that behavior not prohibited by HIPPA?
It is legal. HIPPA protects you from chatty employees and gross incompetence.
"Protects" you. It just gives some penalties to the companies for gross negligence, kind of like the GDPR is trying to do for all of personal data in the EU.
Given the spotty, lost, inconsistent, difficult to access, difficult to share state of medical records in the US, getting a full set, easy peasy, seems like a wonderful problem to have.
Totally unsubstantive, but an interesting anecdotal psychological phenomenon occurred while reading your comment. Before I got to this line:

> As a Brit

I read your comment with no accent, but after I read that line my brain switched your "voice" to a British accented one :-)