BBC medical records story

[Peter Gutmann]

Ross Anderson <Ross.Anderson@cl.cam.ac.uk> writes:

>>I can't see the average patient (eg the typical bloke who won't go
>>and see a doctor until after his leg has fallen off from gangrene)
>>doing this.
>
>Peter, you are completely wrong about this.
>
>In much of Africa, medical records are patient-held. Many people do not go to
>see a doctor unless something is seriously wrong, as it costs money which is
>desparately short. But again, there are almost no problems.

Drawing a parallel between medical conditions in (say) Zaire and the UK is
hardly valid, you'd have to compare apples with apples (eg NZ and the UK).  By
your analogy, fully computerised medical record handling in Zaire should be
trivial, because "in much of NZ, medical records are computer-held" and "there
are almost no problems".

They've been pushing patient-held records here for, I don't know, 5 years at
least (before that the state of the art was DOS-based PCs hooked up to VANs),
and can't make any headway.  I've seen similar efforts in Canada and the US (a
few years ago, dunno what the situation is now but I doubt it's changed) with
similar lack of success.  It doesn't matter whether it works beautifully in
Lubumbashi or not, because I doubt many ukcrypto readers are located there.
The question was whether it could be made to work in the UK.  The answer is
that based on its lack of success in countries which closely resemble the UK
and in situations which closely resemble the UK's, it seems unlikely.

Peter.