IT Q&A-NH2/OF
25/04/2007
14:25
Page 1
Forum
GP IT
Your IT questions answered
The National General Practice IT Group offers advice on common
problems which arise in day-to-day practice
Hard drive failure
Q. Recently, I lost personal information when the hard drive
on my home computer failed. This surprised me as the
computer is less than a year old. How often do hard drives fail?
The biggest study of hard drive failure was published by
Google in February, 2007. As you might imagine, Google
uses a lot of hard drives, more than 100,000 of them. The
research shows that 1.7% of disk drives failed in their first
year of operation, 8% failed during their second year, and
8.6% in their third year. If your hard drive shows a scan
error then it is 39 times more likely to fail within 60 days
than drives without scan errors. What this brings home
clearly is the need for a backup routine for both your
personal information at home, and the patient records in
the practice. Even if it is just a school essay or project
written by your son or daughter, it should be backed up.
Visit labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf for study.
it, discuss it with your practice staff and ask them to sign up
to it. Whether you agree with the GPIT policy or not, it is
important to have some policy in place. Otherwise, one day a
staff member will do something illegal or inappropriate on the
internet and you will be left scrambling on how best to deal
with it. The GPIT group would value feedback on the policy.
General practice electronic patient records
with the Data Protection Commissioner and if so, how do we go
about it?
Yes, you need to register. Once you hold information about
your patients on a computer you become a data controller
and you must be registered with the Data Protection Commissioner. It is an offence not to register. Registration is
easy, go to the website (www.dataprivacy.ie/) where you can
access a registration application form. There is advice available for doctors on how to complete the application form,
navigate to ‘registration’, ‘guidance notes’, and ‘guidance
notes for doctors’, and you should have no difficulty with the
form. There is an annual registration fee which depends on
how many employees you have. For a small practice with
one to five employees the fee is ?25.37.
Q. Our practice has put a lot of money, time and effort into our
electronic patient records. Is there a system for accrediting our
work in this area?
The GPIT group works with the vendors of practice management software to certify their software products as fit for
purpose in general practice, but there is no system for
acknowledging high standards of IT in the practices themselves. In the UK, ‘good practice guidelines’ are available to
support and encourage practices as they move to becoming
paperless or ‘paperlite’. The UK guidelines
(www.dh.gov.uk/en/Publicationsandstatistics/Publications/PublicationsPolicyAndGuidance/DH_4008657) provides a
checklist for practices to consider, including:
• Is the practice management software system certified?
• Is there a signed hardware and software support contract?
• Do you have a disaster recovery plan, verified by your
system supplier?
• Do you have a proper backup strategy including backup
verification?
• Do you have in place a proper security policy including
virus protection, firewall and access control?
• Are the system and all necessary peripherals adequately
insured?
• Are you registered under the Data Protection Act?
• What are your education and training needs and how will
these be achieved?
Acceptable usage of the internet
GP Notebook
Q. Our practice recently installed broadband and I notice that
Q. Sometimes I want to quickly check a clinical question on
the internet, but I don’t want to spend hours wading through
lots of dodgy information. Do you have any advice on a quick
and accurate online source of information for GPs?
Have a look at GP Notebook (www.gpnotebook.co.uk/). GP
Notebook is a concise synopsis of the entire field of clinical
medicine focused on the needs of the GP. The database is
continually being updated by a team of authors who stay up
to date with medical journals, guidelines and policy documents. Try a search on eg. ‘hereditary haemochromatosis’
and a single page will be displayed with links to additional
information on genetics, clinical features, diagnosis, treatment, prognosis and haemosiderosis. Concise accurate
information for the busy GP! Give it a try.
Registration when computerising practice
Q. Our practice is about to computerise. Do we need to register
our support staff check their email and book flights during the
lunch hour. Should I be worried about this?
Your practice should adopt a policy for all staff on appropriate usage of the Internet. The GPIT group has a draft policy
document available for you to consider. From the homepage
of the ICGP (www.icgp.ie/) navigate to ‘courses projects and
programmes’, ‘GP IT training’, and publications and reports.
The policy document is derived from work undertaken by the
HSE, specifically the South East, to successfully attain the
code of practice for information security management:
ISO/IEC 17799:2005. The objective of the policy is to ensure
that the internet facilities provided in general practice are
used appropriately and only in connection with official duties.
The policy takes a restrictive approach to using the internet
in the practice and behaviour such as shopping, booking
flights, and accessing personal email are not allowed. Have a
look at the policy, it’s only three pages long. If you agree with
Dr Brian O’Mahony, GPIT group project manager, is pleased to
receive IT questions from readers at niamh.killeen@icgp.ie
but regrets that he cannot answer individual queries
FORUM May 2007 25