Be afraid, be very afraid

[DimPrawn]

Dear Miss Jones,

Your Vasectomy appointment will be at 2.15pm on Tuesday 12th June.

Regards,

Hampshire County Hospital.

[Lockhouse]

Two hospitals in Hampshire already offshore all their medical typing to South Africa. They have to do this anonymously because there's no Data Protection Act out there. When the typing comes back they match it up to the correct patient by code and send the letters out.

Spot the potential disaster waiting to happen?

[TheMonkey]

Yeah, send it all offshore.

Infact why not just fly everyone out who's ill to Bangalore on Easy Jet and close the fecking lot down.

Makes sense to me.

They'll all die of DVT on the way...

[DimPrawn]

Yeah, send it all offshore.

Infact why not just fly everyone out who's ill to Bangalore on Easy Jet and close the fecking lot down.

Makes sense to me.

the NHS already offshores it's Nurse & Doctor training. IT seems a logical progression

[DimPrawn]

http://services.silicon.com/offshori...9158808,00.htm

Offshoring is an "unstoppable force" according to Richard Granger, the director general for NHS IT.

Speaking at the Government UK IT summit in London he said that while the NHS was using some offshore delivery, IT is perhaps not the most interesting type of offshoring possible.

Granger told the conference: "At the moment the line for us is application development. We have a lot of that being done offshore [but] we are not processing personally identifiable data offshore."

He added: "I think it's an unstoppable force."

But he said what is a potentially more interesting form of overseas outsourcing is "your X-rays will be examined by people in other countries at some point in the future". It made little sense to bring doctors to this country when they could be doing the work from another country, he said.

Granger also said the NHS is still suffering from an "information gap" where data is unable to move around.

He said: "Twenty years of computer systems in large parts of the NHS and what we have created, in many cases, is digital filing cabinets. If we could just get more of the information that exists flowing between sites that would be a great help."

He also said the £6.2bn NHS IT project will save lives and improve services: "We will be judged not on our one per cent spend of the NHS budget on IT but on the millions of patients that will get better care because of these enabling technologies being put in place."

So next time I go have my genital warts looked at, some unqualifed cheapie in a slum in India is going to be pissing himself.