The NHS needs secure apps for exchanging sensitive healthcare information, but it doesn’t need doctors and nurses texting patient data…
Doctors texting clinical patient data on their smartphones is as wrong. Surely everyone can see that, so why is mobile security proving stupidly problematical in the NHS? It’s not as if there are no alternative approaches. Just the other week, Digital Health Intelligence had news of an award-winning clinical imaging app developed in conjunction with University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust.
The Secure Clinical Image Transfer app has been designed from the ground up to be secure; it was at the very heart of the design and development process. As Jane Tovey, the medical illustration services manager at University Hospitals Birmingham puts it: “The encrypted data package is monitored to ensure it is delivered to the correct patient notes and all parts of the pathway are safe and auditable.”
They know it’s a problem. They do it anyway
