Facilitator Handbook 2005 - PRIMIS

Your Local PRIMIS Scheme
PRIMIS Facilitator Handbook
Information Governance issues and the PRIMIS process
Information about patients held by a general practice is confidential. Under certain
circumstances, data can be released to a PCO or other external enquirer. Scheme managers
and practices need to be clear about their respective responsibilities.
There are several issues to be addressed, as follows:
Confidentiality of patients
Data by which any patient could be identified must not be extracted from a practice system by
or for the use of an external enquirer. This clearly rules out such items as the names of
patients or their addresses. It also rules out combinations of data items – such as age, sex and
postcode – which, if considered together, could identify a patient.
The MIQUEST Protocols
The MIQUEST protocols contain full data security and confidentiality safeguards as outlined in
the box below.
Data security and confidentiality safeguards built into the MIQUEST protocols
Before a query is run, the practice has:
• the opportunity to scrutinise the query
• to authorise the query before it can be
run
• the safeguard that an external
enquirer may not access any strong
patient identifiers, such as name,
address, full date of birth, full
postcode, etc.
After a query has run, the practice has:
• the opportunity to scrutinise the
response
• to authorise the response before it is
released to an enquirer
The PRIMIS Guidelines contains extensive recommendations about steps that must be taken
to protect the confidentiality of individual patients and of practices. Where anonymised
information is sufficient for a purpose, information that would enable the patient’s identity to be
traced must be omitted.
PRIMIS 9