Masking Patient Records – Are you ready to comply?
You don’t have to cast your mind too far back to remember when the medical records of 26 million patients were embroiled in a major security breach, amid warnings that the IT systems used by thousands of GPs in the UK were not secure. Privacy campaigners deemed the breach as being truly devastating and GP leaders said the breach had potentially huge implications. The Information Communications Office (ICO) is still investigating concerns that records held in 2700 practices, one in three of those in England, could be accessed by strangers.
With incidents such as these now becoming more and more commonplace it is no wonder Patient Record Pseudonymisation is now mandatory for UK NHS Trusts. For the uninitiated, this means that to comply with NHS Data Governance Standards, UK NHS Trusts must remove personal identifiers, such as patient names and address from data sets prior to any non-direct care usage, i.e. to ensure that individual service users cannot be identified from data used for any purpose other than their direct care.
Now, whilst on the face of it pseudonymisation is a simple concept, scaling out pilot deployments to multiple data sources can be technically challenging, costly and inconsistent. However, with over 20 years’ experience in implementing IT solutions that deliver tangible business results, here at Northdoor we have the expertise and technical excellence to advise and implement solutions to safeguard your data and help prevent NHS Trusts from financial, reputational and operational risks, allowing them to achieve the highest levels of healthcare data protection.
Northdoor’s NHS Patient Record Pseudonymisation solution can provide NHS Trusts with the capability to safeguard personal and sensitive patient information, here is what it enables you to do:
- Rapidly deliver fully pseudonymised data sets
- Pseudonymise data from an extensive range of structured data sources
- Create new and unique reference codes in an automated manner for each run of a report
- Use in-built custom routines to pseudonymise, blank, anonymise or partially anonymise patient data as needed.
- All data remains within the NHS Trust domain
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The mandatory pseudonymisation of patient details will significantly reduce the risks associated with data processing, whilst also maintaining the data’s utility. So, if you are you interested to learn more about how Northdoor could help your organisation to comply with NHS Data Governance Standards, we’d love to hear from you.
Northdoor are now preferred suppliers for public sector and NHS Trusts looking to automatically protect, anonymise and safeguard medical data & other sensitive information. Read about our G-cloud accreditation press announcement.