THE medical records of 50 million people should be accessible on the internet to health professionals within two years after the Department of Health yesterday handed out three huge contracts.

BT won a ten-year deal worth £996 million to set up a system for accessing computerised health records in London, while Accenture was awarded a contract worth £1.1 billion to do the same job in the North East of England.

Accenture was involved with a £4 billion deal to run the Inland Revenue’s tax and national insurance system which became chaotic. The company is hoping that the contract will be renewed but there is speculation it will be excluded from consideration.

BT also won a £620 million contract to set up and run the central Care Records Service, the database that will ultimately make accessible everybody’s health records to clinicians anywhere in the country.

It is expected that three further contracts, covering the North West and West Midlands, Southern, and Eastern regions, will be announced by the end of the year. The system will be among the biggest and most demanding IT applications attempted but John Reid, the Health Secretary, promised that by late next year patients would begin to see the benefits.

The system is designed to allow records previously kept in one place to be accessible to professionals across a wide range of health organisations.

The national record will include a summary of all important information on a patient from different health providers such as GPs and hospitals. Where such records are already on computers, transferring them ought to be simple. A spokesman for the programme said yesterday, however, that there was no plan to convert paper records into electronic form.

“The national programme is not about the wide-scale conversion of records,” he said. “There are no plans for that.” This means that it will be a generation or more before all patient records are available electronically.”

For babies who are born after the system comes into operation, every cough and hiccup will be recorded. For the rest of us, our electronic records will start at the age we have reached when the system is introduced.

Patients worried about confidentiality will be able either to opt out of the service or ask that certain information be contained in a “sealed envelope” so that only those they give permission to have access.

This could include details of whether a patient is HIV positive, has had an abortion, or has mental health problems, for example. The system will also be available only to those with a legitimate reason for accessing a patient’s records. Every time someone goes into a patient’s record it will be logged and if an unauthorised viewing is detected an alert will be sent out to a “privacy officer”.

Mr Reid insisted that the cost of setting up the system would come from central funds. This was intended to reassure many hard-pressed Primary Care Trusts which have said that they may not be able to afford to keep the system running without central support. The system should start to be used by the end of next year — with eight billion transactions being handled by the end of 2008.

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