Summary Care Records

Frontier Psychiatrist has a good post on summary care records, not a fan it appears. I'll share my comments:

I've elected to remain opted in (although I do have a very dull medical history). In my everyday practice on acute medical and surgical takes I have seen many patients who would have benefited from us having access to their SCR - most patients, surprisingly I think, seem to know remarkably little about their past medical history, particularly their surgical history, and in my trust it takes a day or more to get a patient's medical notes (the notes stored for that trust only, anything from elsewhere is very difficult to obtain, including GP data) assuming they haven't been misplaced or lost somewhere on the way. I can think of at least one death in  the last few months that might have been avoided if details of past medical history were known.

I have no doubt that, as with many other big government IT projects, there will be massive cost overruns and huge useability issues, but in theory I think it is a good idea.