Potential use of online patient records

As reported in the media during the past week following a press release published by the Scottish cloud software company Flexiant, researchers at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital are testing the potential use of cloud computing in healthcare.

This project involves Flexiant, the Data Capture and Auto Identification Reference Project (DACAR), which is based at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, and Edinburgh Napier University.

It is important to stress that no real patient records or patient identifiable data are being used in the project and there are no plans to do so.

Any proposal to use cloud computing for real patient records would need to go through a rigorous ethics process and patients would be fully involved.