It would be interesting to know where the practice that had an engineer
in to clean the patient's record off their hard drive is.
Judging by the printed report of course they will be very pleased to
have got those bytes off, as he was given as an example of the need for
a rule in the complaints procedures allowing somebody to be labelled a
vexatious complainer rather than the HA feeling compelled to take each
complaint seriously.

And no doubt there will be many printouts of the content of that record.

However, it does sound as though we think they were stampeded or
allowed themselves to be pressured into doing something we would advise
against - IE losing the opportunity to refer back to the original
records with the audit trail intact.

Previously I have suggested archiving a backup tape with a trusted
third party, such as solicitor or bank, sealed on a particular date and
demonstrably out of our control since then.

Does the audit trail need to be a single sequence of records - IE why
cannot an audit trail be constructed which refers only to one set of
notes, and this be archived separately with that set of notes?  It
seems to be an article of faith from our suppliers, and perhaps even
from the FHS CU via RFA but in the past many articles of faith have
turned out to be nothing more than relics of a particular way of doing
things.
Is there a reference demonstrating the inevitability of this
requirement?

Data Warehousing in bulk vs MIQUEST
----------------------------------------------
If the HAs go ahead with data warehousing int he way they would tend to
by instinct - copy every record to a central place, then sift it, then
when will that record be purged of people who have left the HA area?
It shoudl be immediate, since there can be no clinical need for the HA
or PCG bean counters to retain their records once they are not part of
the population served.

And yet, one would wish to compare events last year with this year and
next year, and on to doomsday, in order to run the service.

Therefore a means must be found to abstract the relevant infromation
from such records, and store that without identifying the vanished
patient in the admin records...

Therefore, that means could be used in the first place, to abstract
only the administratively necessary data from the records safe on the
practice computer, avoiding much transmission and tasty aggregation of
named patient data under circumstancs where frankly the assurances that
the records are safe are barely credible given the demonstrated levels
of competence and secret compliance with instructions.


%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%