Increasing use of technology, the internet and – that buzzword du jour – data is generally associated with progress. But two stories this week illustrate how these things can sometimes cause bigger problems than they solve.

A list of the 10 most common problems caused by the electronic prescription service (EPS), produced by Pharmacy Voice last month, indicates their daily nature – and the lobbying group identified 70 more ongoing issues.

As if these frequent glitches weren’t bad enough – at the very least, they all add up to wasting your and your teams’ time – there have been at least three widespread outages of the system since September, the latest a “nightmare” fault with major system supplier Cegedim last week.

So the phrasing used by EPS chiefs at HSCIC to explain their survey on the service – they want to “understand your views about incidents [that] could affect the smooth running of EPS” – raised my hackles. Perhaps I’m being oversensitive, but that small word ‘could’ seems to imply that ‘smooth running’ is the norm and these ‘incidents’ are a distant possibility. That’s simply not the case.

And so to patient data, which can be a valuable resource to boost your business and patient care through better understanding of their needs, as Numark marketing director Mandeep Mudhar advised at the support group’s conference last month.

But Pharmacy2U has realised it took the idea of patient data as a ‘resource’ too far, after a media backlash against its sale of 18,000 names and addresses. The internet business insists its actions met data protection guidelines, which is a bit like defending tax avoidance: just because it’s not expressly forbidden doesn’t make it morally defensible, nor that the public will support it. And now C+D has learned that, in fact, Pharmacy2U will be investigated by privacy watchdog the Information Commissioner’s Office.

In its defence – though it’s rather ‘shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted’ – Pharmacy2U responded immediately to the public exposure of its data sale by updating its privacy policy to state that it will not sell any personal information, nor disclose it without prior consent.

If only we could be confident that the HSCIC investigation into EPS ‘incidents’ would result in such swift action.

Jennifer Richardson is editor of C+D. Email her at [email protected] or contact her on Twitter at @CandDJennifer

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