Government announces new Open Data plans

Chancellor George Osborne

The government has pledged that everybody in England will have online access to their GP records by “the end of this parliament” in 2015.

The announcement was made as part of Chancellor George Osborne’s Autumn Statement, which painted a generally bleak picture of the UK economy, while including some measures to try and stimulate growth.

Among these are a Plan for Growth that includes a number of Open Data measures aimed at stimulating industry and jobs. These were developed in collaboration with a number of companies including GlaxoSmithKline.

A document outlining the measures says providing access to personal GP records online will empower patients and encourage the market for education in data management and learning platforms.

“GP practices that can already provide online access are encouraged to do so,” it says. Successive governments have promised patients electronic access to their records.

Giving patients ‘control’ of their records was a central plank of the ‘Information Revolution’ consultation that the government ran last year, that was supposed to lead to a new information strategy for the NHS.

However, the Information Revolution document went on to talk about giving patients access to a wider range of documents, including hospital records, letters and test results, as well as access to transactional services.

Today’s announcement is less ambitious with regard to patient access, but more ambitious about opening up information to industry.

The Open Data measures published on the Cabinet Office website say that from September 2012, healthcare datasets from GP practices will be linked with hospital data to enable healthcare impacts to be tracked across the entire health service.

The secure data linkage service - set up by the Health and Social Care Information Centre - will allow users to track the efficacy and cost-effectiveness of things like drugs and procedures and is expected to put the UK in a “prime position for research investment.”

The Department of Health said these linked data sets would provide the health service, pharmaceutical industry, academics and other professionals with “unequalled levels of information about the journeys of patients through the care system and the outcomes of different treatments.”

The document also repeats earlier announcements that the government will publish practice-level prescribing data by September 2012 and additional health and social care datasets by September 2013.

This will include GP reference data, Care Quality Commission Provider Profile Reports and Choose and Book usage at GP practice level.

Health secretary Andrew Lansley said patients would benefit directly from efforts to make health data transparent and easy to use by the medical research community. “This will fuel advances in treatment, as well as positioning this country as a centre of excellence for research,” he said.

Osborne’s statement lowered growth forecasts for this year to just 0.9% and next year to just 0.7%.

However, he reiterated the government’s commitment to making rapid cuts in the UK’s budget deficit - despite admitting that it would have to borrow an additional £111 billion by 2016 over previous forecasts.

Osborne indicated that there would be more public sector job losses, with the independent Office of Budget Responsibility later estimating that an additional 710,000 jobs would go by 2017.

Osborne also announced that public sector pay rises would be capped at 1% for at least two years, and that the pension age would rise to 67 earlier than planned, in 2028.

Overall, the OBR predicted that people living in the UK will not see real earnings growth until the second quarter of 2013; while it will fall by 2.3% next year, a post-war record.