It seems to me useful to have an online verification service.
One of the more worrying points that came out at the recent
Cambridge workshop was that the N Yorks HA detects 30 false
pretext telephone calls a week. Presumably most of the others
don't and these false pretext calls succeed in obtaining
personal health information to which the caller is not entitled.
In fact, the only explanation for such a volume of bogus calls
is that they work almost everyhwere else.
This translates to perhaps 100,000 privacy violations a year by
HAs, and presumably a fair few more by careless general practices
and hospitals.
In the guidelines we published in January in the BMJ, we
recommended calling back whenever the caller was not known
personally. The responses to this renged from `we've done this
for years' to `we could never do that in a busy surgery' and `I
can't afford a copy of the Medical Directory to sit by every
telephone'.
So maybe an online service would remove some of the resistance,
but it would need to have more than just the doctor's name and
qualifications. It would need to have current phone and fax
numbers as well.
Comments?
Ross
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