Medical Records: Disclosure of Information
(asked on 3rd March 2020) - View Source
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what proportion of the population have accessed their medical records (a) online and (b) via an app in each year since 2012.
The Department is committed to ensuring that citizens using the National Health Service are able to access high quality, effective healthcare services that are responsive to patients’ needs. Digital tools, such as the NHS App, are able to support people to access their medical records.
The percentage of the general practitioner (GP) registered population that have registered and are able to access their medical record online is as follows:
Month/Year | % of population that are registered and able to access their medical record online (including via an App) |
December 2015 | 0.6% |
December 2016 | 0.9% |
December 2017 | 4.30% |
December 2018 | 6.77% |
December 2019 | 8.66% |
Prior to 2015, no patients were registered to access their medical record online.
The NHS App launched following a period of testing from September 2018 to January 2019, and now has over 250,000 registered users.
The proportion of the GP-registered population who have registered to access and have accessed their medical records via the NHS App is as follows:
Date | Number of people registered for NHS App (% of eligible GP population registered for NHS App) | Number of unique medical record accesses via the NHS App each month |
December 2018 | 3,260 (0.01%) |
|
January 2019 | 3,886 (0.01%) |
|
February 2019 | 4,552 (0.01%) | 1,248 |
March 2019 | 7,666 (0.01%) | 1,984 |
April 2019 | 15,326 (0.03%) | 4,696 |
May 2019 | 29,802 (0.06%) | 11,828 |
June 2019 | 44,759 (0.09%) | 19,270 |
July 2019 | 64,382 (0.13%) | 26,358 |
August 2019 | 86,934 (0.17%) | 31,807 |
September 2019 | 111,076 (0.22%) | 36,870 |
October 2019 | 144,378 (0.28%) | 51,093 |
November 2019 | 179,666 (0.35%) | 57,586 |
December 2019 | 212,633 (0.41%) | 57,415 |
We do not have data on the number of users who have solely accessed their records online. However we do capture the total number of monthly transactions for both online and app access. In the month of December 2019 patients accessed their medical records 1 million times.
Date | Total medical record view transactions (via online and an app) |
December 2015 | Data quality issues |
December 2016 | Data quality issues |
December 2017 | Data quality issues |
December 2018 | 0.7 million |
December 2019 | 1.0 million |