A smartcard authentication system to control access to NHS patient data is up and running and ready to be rolled out to 800,000 health service users.

The system has been developed as part of BT's work on the data spine at the heart of the £5m National Programme and is already in use in the small-scale electronic bookings trial.

As National Programme systems start to be rolled out across the country next month, clinicians will be issued with the cards, a password and user identification, to grant access to systems and allow an audit trail of who is looking at what.

'In amongst building interfaces into patient administration systems, some of which are 10 years old, and launching the world's first country-wide ebooking system, we also have the core infrastructure in place to control access to a higher standard than any other civil environment by the 800,000 users,' NHS IT director general Richard Granger told Computing.