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LONDON – British health officials believe they may have a new way to leverage existing IT to facilitate portable, secure health data.
The West Midlands region of the UK's National Health Service has purchased 300 USB SafeSticks from IT manufacturer BlockMaster. The SafeSticks will be used within the West Midlands Ambulance Service, which covers 5,000 square miles and services 5.3 million people. The Ambulance Service employs 3,300 workers, 58 ambulance stations and 864 vehicles.
All members of the staff who wish to transport patient health data will use the SafeSticks, which are equipped with automatic hardware encryption. The SafeConsole Web interface will be used to manage the information on the sticks from any location.
Softek, a supplier of IT security, storage and archiving solutions has been selected as the distributor of the BlockMaster SafeSticks.
Data protection and privacy concerns loom large in all healthcare IT rollouts. Stolen hardware and breached databases are often cited as drawbacks to digitizing medical records and treatment documentation. Nonetheless, the UK serves as an example of one of the most visible and ambitious adopters of nationwide healthcare IT, with the controversial £12 billion National Programme several years past deadline and billions of pounds over budget.
"With the public sector being one of the hardest hit sectors for data loss, it is great to see that the ambulance service is setting the benchmark with information security," said Danel Östner, CEO of BlockMaster. "Hopefully over the coming months we will see more companies being proactive with data protection, however we believe it is our role to help organisations achieve this by making solutions that have the highest grade security but are also easy-to-use."
More than 100 UK-based emergency services and NHS organizations are currently using SafeSticks and SafeConsole to protect portable health data, BlockMaster said in a press release.
