14 DAY TRIAL // Richard Thomas, an Information Commissioner, tries to convince the House of Lords that doctors who lose their laptops and obviously, patients' information should pay a consistent fine, The Times reported today. Mr. Thomas even added that some of the doctors should be forced to pay no less than ?5,000 if they lose their notebooks because this is only negligence which can't be accepted when talking about the patients' details. "If a doctor, or hospital [employee] leaves a laptop containing patients' records in his car and it is stolen, it is hard to see that is anything but gross negligence," Richard Thomas said according to The Times.
Well, it might be a new way to force the doctors to protect their laptops but I'm not sure this is the best solution they could find. Probably, they would install security or encryption software solutions on the notebooks to protect the patients' information but that is not as useful as it might sound.
You can't expect from a doctor to be a security expert so the entire job is automatically transferred to the security companies which provide the software. That's why this announcement is pretty useful for many of them as it might represent a new source of money for their business.
"On the one hand, this is great news for patient rights groups. Given the recent spate of data breaches at NHS trusts, perhaps Richard Thomas's approach of hard compulsion is the only way to get the medical establishment to take this problem seriously," Jamie Cowper, director of European Marketing at PGP Corporation, a security firm, told The Register. "However, by placing the emphasis on protecting the device - specifically laptops - rather than the confidential data itself, he could be accused of treating the symptoms of this problem, rather than providing a cure."