27 April 2009 | Author: K. Todd Search Copywriter

Tories advocate Google Health for UK health records

Conservative party leader David Cameron has asserted that, should the party win the election, plans to move the UK's health records into the cloud would go ahead.

That is, rather than having a government supercomputer safeguard the country's medical information, Britain's health records would be instead chronicled online via a Google or Microsoft-run cloud computing application.

According to The Register, Mr Cameron slated Labour's current scheme and heralded the opportunity arising from the web, saying: "You don't need a massive central computer to do this. People can store their health records securely online, they can show them to whichever doctor they want...

"But best of all in this age of austerity, a web-based version of the government's bureaucratic scheme services like Google Health or Microsoft Health Vault cost virtually nothing to run."

Undoubtedly expense is a talking point: it costs a huge amount to keep the country's health records stored centrally and the system is also criticised for being somewhat unreliable. And, although it's true that the odd medical record does go missing, there's no questioning that the current storage system is generally pretty safe otherwise.

With the Tories' plan, a surge of protestation has bubbled up. It is not much help to the party's case that recent accusations that cloud computing - the type of service the Tories hope to use from Google or Microsoft - is not yet the safest form of storing information. Once on the cloud, data could be subject to illegal access from third parties - and that has the potential to spell trouble for pretty much everyone registered with a doctor in the UK.

Furthermore, concerned UK citizens have raised the possibility of either Google or Microsoft - or any other company used for the service - utilising what is essentially private information for their own gain, with users discovering health-related targeted ads popping up during browsing.

Whatever happens during the fight to win government control, the suggestion of storing such a massive collection of highly important files is a massive headline for cloud computing and could see the industry gaining further attention from businesses looking to store information cheaply and efficiently.