Editorial Tuesday 23 October 2012: Chatham House chat on customer service. Oh, and Tim Kelsey wants you to use the NHS Number

Last night, I went to a meeting about 'making the NHS a world-class customer service'.

Which was nice.

Unfortunately, it was only announced when I got there that the event was being held under the Chatham House Rule. So I can't tell you who the senior person there present was.

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But that person had a lot to say about the subject.

It's particularly unfortunate because that senior person told the meeting that in a new NHS culture of openness and participative discussion, when it comes to the issue of resource constraints, "my money is on drug rationing bringing this to a head, rather than hospital closures".

I can tell you that it seems pretty clear that the NHS Commissioning Board intends to drive change to let patients access their records online electronically by 2015.

And my hypothesis is that this will work using the NHSCB's holding of the GP contract (talks on the renegotiation of which have just reportedly broken down).

This senior person suggested in reply to my question on this issue that "we don’t think about those contracts. We have to recognise the business benefits, and work with primary care to deploy basic ways of meeting important customer service opportunities with data. The new system won't work if we have to resort to contractual legal sanction, but the plan is to articulate and be quite demanding of rolling this out, but not in the language of legal contact management. We have to see what happens, but I think we can get to 100% coverage without massive incentive or legal sanctions - to give all patients access to their electronic records by 2015".

Oh, and on a completely unrelated matter, Tim Kelsey, National Director for Patients and Information of the NHS Commissioning Board yesterday told me that he wanted to go on the record as saying that "if we contractually mandate that patients' NHS Number must always be used for all commissioned services, we will move one step nearer to genuinely linked data".

If I were you, I should get moving on making sure you do this.