Surely that's the point of hooking them up to the network, so you can e.g. get the pictures out of your CT scanner on to the doctor's PC?

The doctors' PC can run just fine on an isolated network and doesn't have to be connected to the internet.

No that wouldn't work. Modern healthcare is a team effort, especially for patients with complex conditions. Doctors must be able to collaborate with each other including securely sharing data across the Internet in order to deliver effective patient care. No one is going to give up on that just to prevent a few isolated security incidents.

> securely sharing data

> security incidents

That's the idea behind N3, the NHS's internal network. The idea of a hard shell with a soft centre. With N3 as large as it is, the idea breaks down. Security in depth is required, secure at every level. The hard shell idea is outdated, and N3 is scheduled to be turned off in 2019.

So you propose a separate, isolated network linking all the medical facilities, doctor's offices and private practices nationwide? Even the military doesn't do that for most of their offices.

Also, the doctor's computer pretty much needs to interface with the system(s) that handles patient billing (and thus non-medical companies) and the system(s) that handle patient scheduling, reminders, etc.

> patient billing

Not really an issue in the NHS, apart from the occasional non-resident foreign national.

(The "fundholding" system does mean there's a certain amount of internal billing which the patient is never aware of, but the beating Bevinist heart of the free-at-point-of-use system is still in place)

Free-at-point-of use process tend to be ones that require integration with a billing service, namely, to send information about the performed procedures to whatever system is paying for them, no matter if it's some state agency, private insurance, or whatever else - that's what I meant by non-medical companies that would need to be on the network.

A private practice where everything is paid by the patient in full by cash or CC could do without any integration with external systems (just run a standard cash register), but as soon as someone else is paying for it, you generally need to link the doctor's office systems to that in some way.

Until that doctor needs to submit patient info to a study, look up an obscure symptoms, talk with others in the medical community, etc.