Patients to be given Google health records
Individuals would share their notes with private hospitals and patient support groups, under the plans which would also involve the scrapping of the centralised database system currently being introduced in the health service, which has been dogged by problems and delays.
Under the Conservative scheme, patients would be able to annotate their official records, alerting family doctors and hospitals to side-effects they had suffered as a result of taking medication, or medical symptoms which had gone undetected.
The Tories will consult on more radical measures such as whether patients should be given the right to "edit" their own records, deleting information with which they disagreed. In such instances, NHS doctors might still be given access to the unedited version, it suggests. They say their plans would cost almost nothing, compared to the £12bn cost of Labour's scheme, which is now running four years late, and will not be in place until 2014.
