Smart Healthcare: Mental health | SmartHealthcare.com

Incapacity team rolls out EPR

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 09:50:16 GMT

A partnership providing support to incapacity benefit claimants has implemented an electronic patient record system

Tees Valley Condition Management Programme (CMP), which consists of five NHS organisations in the district and the local Jobcentre Plus, has set up a system based on AxSys Technology's Excelicare software to replace a manual system.

The partnership supports people claiming incapacity benefit or employment benefit allowance who consider their health condition to be one of the barriers preventing them from returning to work. Referral to the programme is routed via an advisor at the Jobcentre into Tees Valley CMP.

The EPR, which went live in May, provides records from referral to discharge, including clinicial assessments and scoring. It is used by 19 remote workers, including administrative and management staff, nurses, occupational therapists and health psychologists operating at 12 localities.

Jayne Robson, associate director, Tees Valley CMP, said it had begun to develop a solution in-house when it discovered that AxSys had produced a similar solution for CMP in Scotland,
and found it was adaptable to its own work processes.

It has now added details of about 200 patients to the system.

Maudsley tags mentally ill offenders

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 14:47:01 GMT

The South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust is using satellites to track psychiatric patients with criminal convictions

The launch follows a successful 12 month pilot project in which 35 mentally ill patients at River House, a medium secure psychiatric unit at the Bethlem Royal Hospital in Beckenham, took part.

The unit now has 60 devices and plans to use the system on more patients over the coming months.

"We started using the system last year and increased the service in March, but we needed to make sure that everything had bedded in before announcing its use," a spokesperson for the Maudsley told SmartHealthcare.com.

The patients have been detained after committing a range of offences including violent crimes, arson and anti-social behaviour. They are being fitted with ankle tags linked by satellite to a control room, which alerts the hospital when a patient goes to an area they're excluded from, or is away for too long.

The system can measure whether the tracking device, and therefore the patient, is moving and at what speed. In addition, the ankle tag vibrates to remind a patient when they are nearing the end of their allotted time away from hospital.

The pilot showed that the system led to fewer leave related problems, as the trust can identify the patient's whereabouts and re-establish contact quickly. It also enabled the trust to increase the leave given to River House patients.

"Graduated leave, with increasing degrees of freedom as patients recover, is an important therapeutic process that aids re-skilling and social reintegration of people who have been in hospital, often for long periods of time," said the spokesperson. "Technology is an added assurance to a rigorous clinical and risk assessment process."

The system was developed by Buddi and each device, including straps, costs £374, plus £50 per month per device for monitoring. The spokesperson added: "We think the system will cut the costs of searching for patients who have absconded."

One of the patients who used the device while at River House said that it had helped to keep him "more safe". He now lives in a hostel after 13 years in secure hospitals following a conviction for arson.

"If I was to have an accident of any kind it would be easier to pick me up," said the patient, although he added that the tracker was uncomfortable when worn for long periods, and that: "Sometimes it makes you feel a bit childish... almost labeled."

NHS faces £65bn PFI repayment bill

Sade Laja — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 13:50:14 GMT

The Department of Health has said that the NHS will eventually pay six times the original value of Private Finance Initiative (PFI) buildings

A spokesperson for health secretary Andrew Lansley said such payments are already increasing sharply, telling SmartHealthcare.com that the coalition government will have to pay "twice as much in PFI payments as Labour did in the last five years" over the same time period.

DoH figures show that overall unitary charge payments for PFI projects from 2010-11 to 2014-15 are expected to reach £7.2bn, compared with £3.9bn in real terms for the equivalent five year period from 2005-06 to 2009-10.

PFIs allow private companies to fund the building of hospitals and mental health units, while the NHS pays for the facilities over a number of years.

According to data obtained by the BBC, 103 PFI projects that were originally valued at £11.3bn will cost the NHS more than £50bn to repay. Once extra costs such as maintenance, cleaning and catering are considered the NHS is due to pay back £65.1bn over the lifetime of the deals, some of which last 25 years.

"Labour said they were using the unprecedented increase in NHS spending to build new hospitals, but in truth they left the bill to be picked up by us," Lansley's spokesperson said.

"Though the new hospitals which we are now paying for are welcome, other financing options should have been on the table. Our recent white paper sets out our intentions to give foundation trusts greater freedoms, which will involve their being able to access borrowing in a more flexible manner."

According to DoH data, the NHS currently pays back a total of £1.25bn each year, but this figure is expected to increase until 2030 when it will hit £2.3bn. The final payment will not be made until 2048.

The NHS budget has been ring-fenced, but the government has said that it expects the health service to make £20bn in efficiency savings by 2014.

Victor Almeida, healthcare analyst at Kable, believes that although the coalition government is committed to granting trusts more liberties including flexible borrowing and unlimited patient chargeable services, it will not be easy for hospitals to extricate themselves from PFI deals lasting years or decades.

"It will be very challenging for some trusts to spend up to 15% of their budget on PFI payments and on top of that make a further 20% efficiency savings in order to cope with our population's increasing health demands, despite the improved financial and funding freedoms," Almeida said.

He also thinks there would be "disastrous consequences" if some hospitals were allowed to go bankrupt before their PFI term was finished.

"Given the state of the economy and government austerity measures, it is extremely unlikely that new PFI initiatives will be created in the next few years. But they could certainly recur in five to 10 years, once the 'anti-previous government' rhetoric has worn off," Almeida added.

Sade Laja

Paul Hodgkin of Patient Opinion: Big Society or just Big Conversation?

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 08:00:00 GMT

The web represents an effective and efficient way to hear marginalised people's voices

Jerry and his girlfriend had been leading the usual chaotic lives of drug addicts when she fell pregnant. Shocked, they pulled themselves together, got on a treatment programme and found somewhere to live. With help and support the baby was born but some weeks later they used Patient Opinion to post this message to their clinic: "Me and my girlfriend have just had a baby. You think we're clean but sometimes we still slip up. We want to stop and we want to tell you. But we're afraid if we do you'll take our baby away. What's the deal?"

There are several remarkable things about this posting. Firstly it's easy to forget just how new it is, for Jerry and lots of marginalised people like him, to have a public voice. If you wanted a public voice before the web then you had to get a letter published in a newspaper. Now anyone can blog, use Facebook or post clips of their consultation on YouTube. But having a voice is not the same as being heard. Facebook is great for lots of things but not so hot for interacting with the busy staff who run Ward 15.

So the second remarkable thing is that the medical director of Jerry's clinic did indeed post a reply that told Jerry – and anyone else who cares to look – exactly what that clinic's policy is around protection of vulnerable children. This small act meant that Jerry and his small family stayed in touch and on treatment.

Creating a platform that does this is not straightforward (at Patient Opinion it's taken us six years so far). Directing your story to just the right three or five or eight people locally who are responsible for the service you use is, relatively speaking, the easy bit even though the NHS has more than a million users per day. Finding the right incentives that help everyone from Jerry to 83 year grannies with colostomies to participate is much harder. Add the needs of busy staff who understandably will only act on patient feedback if they perceive it to be honest, well intentioned and helpful and you can see why sites like Patient Opinion have taken a while to get right.

But perhaps the most remarkable thing about Jerry's posting is that it happened on his terms. His small but vital question got asked in his way, on his initiative. Democratised voice shifts power from institutions to individuals. Monolithic hierarchies are giving way to networks of connected individuals.

The Big Society is Cameron's way of riding these changes. Like most politicians he is not leading but following. However, Cameron is not following political principle or ideology, he is following the new economics of the web. Cheap voice democratises participation. Being able to find 'people like me' makes it much easier and cheaper for groups to get organised. And forcing bureaucracies to hold conversations in public, because that is the place where people choose to speak, shifts power to citizens. These new economic opportunities have already turned the music, travel, broadcast and retail industries upside down. The Big Society is just one particular way of viewing how Twitter and Facebook and Flickr are already changing politics and participation.

That previously excluded people like Jerry can now set the terms of these conversations does indeed make society 'bigger' – not just because the previously marginalised are now heard, but bigger in the sense of being big-hearted, more rooted in the human because more human voices are engaged in more conversations, at lower cost and with more effect than ever before.

Paul Hodgkin is a GP and chief executive of Patient Opinion, a not-for-profit social enterprise

NHS starts to cut staff numbers

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 12:31:09 GMT

The NHS Information Centre says that the NHS in England has started to shrink, particularly affecting infrastructure staff and managers

The community and health sectors employed 3,351 less people in April this year, down 0.3% from the peak health employment figure of 1,219,500 in March 2010.

Senior manager and manager positions fell between March and April by 2.5%, with 1151 fewer posts. The government outlined plans in its recent white paper, Liberating the NHS, to cut management costs by 45%.

Central functions, which includes informatics and IT, saw a 0.3% drop of 336 in the number of staff employed. A spokesperson for the NHS Information Centre told SmartHealthcare.com that a specific breakdown of figures for IT staff was not available.

The NHS Information Centre numbers also revealed that scientific, therapeutic and technical staff dropped by 0.2% in April 2010 compared to March, accounting for a reduction of 326 employees.

In a Guardian Careers online forum organised by SmartHealthcare.com on 21 July 2010, Mik Horswell, director of marketing and communications of the UK Council for Health Informatics Professions (UK Chip), said that NHS informatics faced "challenging times".

"It is true that with the order of cost savings demanded nationally, quite separately to the white paper changes, there is risk to the whole budget for these services. I know of one such HIS (health information) service asked to release 25% of its budget without reducing services," he said. "Challenging times."

Join our live online careers forum

Steve Gold — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 15:00:18 GMT

Taking place on Wednesday 21 July, 1pm-4pm, in association with Guardian Careers

The coalition may have said the NHS budget will grow in real terms, unlike other parts of the state sector, but informatics and health IT look set to be affected by the major reorganisation of the health service recently announced by minister Andrew Lansley.

Primary care trusts and strategic health authorities will be closed, although new GP commissioning groups will be formed in their place, and changes are expected to the National Programme for IT. However, the government is also planning to increase the amounts of data published online, for transparency and to help patients choose services.

You can discuss what the changes to informatics and health IT might mean for those working in these areas, as well as find out how to start or advance your career, through SmartHealthcare.com's first online careers forum, on Wednesday 21 July from 1pm to 4pm, held in association with Guardian Careers. Questions can be posted in advance, or asked live during the session.

To join the forum, either to post a question in advance or on the day, click here.

Panellists

Steve Gold is an expert writer on IT, security and health. He worked for the NHS for 11 years as both a nurse and as an accountant before leaving to pursue a career in journalism. As well as writing regularly for SmartHealthcare.com, he acts as technical editor for Infosecurity magazine.

Mik Horswell initially trained as a healthcare general manager and followed this career path mainly in acute hospitals before changing course after 10 years into the emerging specialism of information management and managed information and IT functions at hospitals and health authorities for a further 10 years. Leaving the NHS at director level, he moved into management consultancy and for 14 years has worked with suppliers and NHS organisations at all levels on strategy and project management of information and communications technology, information governance. He is very interested in professional development and is chairman of his local Institute of Healthcare Management region, is currently director of marketing & communications of the UK Council for Health Informatics Professions (UK Chip), a member of Assist's National Council and a chartered member of the British Computer Society.

Jenny Jackson is an informatics graduate management trainee within the NHS's Yorkshire and Humber region, nearing the end of the final year of the scheme. Prior to the scheme, she undertook a 12 month placement within health informatics as part of a four year BA Hons Business Studies degree. She has been in health informatics for about four years, working in various roles and organisations. Following the scheme, she has just been successful in securing a project manager job working with the Yorkshire and Humber's Long Term Conditions Programme and Stroke Telehealth.

Ben Needham is a systems integration manager for iSoft, a health software firm with major software development and systems integration operations in the UK which claims to be the largest supplier of IT to the NHS. A version of its Lorenzo suite of software has been developed specifically for use by NHS trusts, as part of the National Programme for IT.

Alan Simmons is careers consultant for the NHS Careers information service in England. He's been with NHS Careers for 10 years, and has a prior background in providing careers advice to people of all ages and backgrounds, but with a particular focus on school and college students. Alan is a frequent contributor to the Guardian Careers' health forum.

To join the forum, click here.

Steve Gold

DoH axes NHS-wide Microsoft contract

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 14:47:14 GMT

The Department of Health is ending the £500m deal between Microsoft and the health service in England

A DoH spokesperson confirmed that it will not renew its contract with the software firm for 900,000 licences for Microsoft's PC software, which was due for renewal this year.

"The Department of Health has already invested so that NHS trusts are able to have access to the latest versions of Microsoft desktop software," the spokesperson told SmartHealthcare.com on 15 July 2010.

"Future investment decisions will be taken at a local level, in line with the proposals set out in the white paper published this week."

The Liberating the NHS white paper promises that NHS organisations will increasingly be enabled to be "customers of a more plural system of IT and other suppliers".

The current agreement with Microsoft was signed in November 2004, when the number of licences was extended from 500,000 to 900,000.

Former health secretary John Hutton claimed at the time that the deal would result in savings of £330m on the department's existing arrangement, describing it as an "exceptionally good deal for the taxpayer".

Although the Department of Health said the value of the deal was "commercially confidential", reports in the Financial Times and other sources estimated the value at £500m.

The 2004 contract with Microsoft followed a trial of open source software the previous year. Then NHS IT director Richard Granger had ordered a trial of a Linux-based system from Sun Microsystems, saying that if it proved effective the NHS could save money and have use of "rich and innovative software technology".

Southern trusts complete BT-RiO deal

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 23:05:00 GMT

Three southern trusts have joined the contract signed last year by BT and Connecting for Health (CfH) for the implementation of the RiO care records system

The latest trusts to sign up have completed the deal with BT, which required the participation of 25 NHS organisations, for the installation of the software from CSE Healthcare Systems. A spokesperson for CfH told SmartHealthcare.com that it could not reveal the names of the latest trusts to sign up for RiO due to confidentiality reasons.

In June 2009, CfH signed a £546m deal with BT, which covers the installation of RiO in 25 mental and community health sites and Cerner's Millennium system in four acute trusts. The contract, which is specifically for the southern region, also includes the management of existing Cerner installations in eight trusts - taking over from Fujitsu Services.

Before the three trusts joined the contract, only 22 sites were signed up to receive RiO. A spokesperson for BT told SmartHealthcare.com that out of the 25 sites now on board, there are 10 left to go live with the system, which will happen by late spring. The company said the installations are going well and it is confident that the roll out will be successful.

"We have experience of installing RiO technology in London, so we are confident that will hold us in good stead," the spokesperson added.

BT disclosed that the 10 trusts left to go live with the technology are: Ridgeway Partnership NHS Trust, Cornwall Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, Oxford and Buckinghamshire Mental Health Foundation Trust, and the primary care trusts for Portsmouth City, Surrey, Buckinghamshire, Milton Keynes, Solent West, Hampshire and Kent and Medway.

In August, all the sites in the south that are live with RiO are expected to be part of a national upgrade from V5 of the software to V5.4.

SCRs have cost NHS £96m

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 11:07:36 GMT

Healthcare IT minister Simon Burns has said the government has invested £96.7m in summary care records to date, with plans to spend a further £48.8m

Burns revealed, in a parliamentary written answer to Conservative MP David Davis, that costs incurred by the NHS through local implementation of SCRs are not collected centrally, which suggests that the figure may be substantially higher than £96m.

"The government is reviewing the content and opt-out arrangements for the summary care record which will inform final decisions on future spending plans as part of the government's spending review," said Burns.

In June the minister announced that the development of the central electronic patient record, a major feature of England's NHS National Programme for IT, was under review with a focus on ownership of the information.

In a letter to the British Medical Association at the time, he said there was a "need to ensure security of data contained in the record" and that the government needed "to review the content of the record and to agree with key stakeholders what should be added to the record and over what timescale".

SCRs have been widely criticised by academics, most recently by University College London, which concluded that the records had only achieved "modest benefits".

After a three year evaluation of the electronic patient record, researchers at the university found that SCRs are little used so far, despite 1.59m having been created.

Scotland sets up healthcare knowledge database

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 11:00:43 GMT

Scottish health secretary Nicola Sturgeon has opened a system to provide NHS staff with online information on patient care, clinical practice and research

The Knowledge Network, which will be managed by NHS Education for Scotland, provides a search engine to 11m pieces of learning and information from over 100 providers.

The site is open, but access to some services requires a log-in which will be available to 170,000 health service staff in Scotland as well as those in social services and students. It cost £72,000 to develop the website, with a further £100,000 for a search index system.

Launching the system on 7 June 2010, Sturgeon said: "We know that a skilled, motivated and committed workforce, with access to the right knowledge, tools and materials is a key component to delivering the highest quality healthcare for the people of Scotland.

"That is why today's announcement on the Knowledge Network is to be welcomed, not only will it save staff time, it will allow them to access a wealth of information which for the first time will be available online in the same place."

NHS board to take SHAs' responsibilities

Wed, 26 May 2010 09:13:13 GMT

Strategic health authorities are to lose work to a national commissioning board, under plans announced with the Queen's speech

The speech, given by the Queen at the state opening of Parliament on 25 May 2010, includes a bill to reform the structure of the health service in England, including the creation of an independent national board to allocate resources and provide guidance on commissioning.

This will remove some work from SHAs. "The board will combine functions currently provided by the Department of Health and strategic health authorities, and deliver these in a much more streamlined way," said the Department of Health. "So the remit of SHAs will change – the board will exercise its functions through the regional offices that will report directly to the chief executive."

It added: "In the meantime, strategic health authorities will continue to have a vital role in delivering financial control and performance, and driving improvements in quality and productivity. They will play a key role in creating an NHS that is able to focus on outcomes and deliver through strong commissioning.
"The process of change will begin with SHAs themselves, where there will be a clearer split between their commissioner and provider responsibilities."

The statement gives SHAs an ongoing role, despite a report in Health Service Journal that new health secretary Andrew Lansley is planning to abolish the regional bodies as part of the health bill.

SHAs play a role in the NHS National Programme for IT in helping to coordinate the work of the local service providers.

Lancashire trusts sign £9m network deal

Tue, 11 May 2010 10:03:46 GMT

Seven healthcare trusts across Lancashire have signed a collaborative network contract, including support for mobile working, with Virgin Media Business

The £9m deal will connect 170 healthcare sites including those at Lancashire Care NHS Foundation Trust, NHS Blackburn with Darwen, NHS East Lancashire, East Lancashire Hospitals Trust, NHS Central Lancashire, NHS North Lancashire and Lancashire Teaching Hospitals Trust. A number of other trusts within the area are also considering joining the contract.

The trusts hope the high speed network will help staff benefit from mobile working. The deal will also include a bespoke service desk to provide a single point of contact for the healthcare community.

Associate director of IM&T at Lancashire Care NHS Foundation Trust Declan Hadley told SmartHealthcare.com that the network is currently being implemented. "At the moment Virgin is putting fibre optics in the ground," he said.

He said it was likely that the full installation would take six to eight months and would be "fully operational everywhere by Christmas".

Hadley also revealed that the trusts are in the early stages of exploring the possibility of a single telephony system, which would be based "inside a Virgin Media cloud".

He said that the trusts also envisage having a completely integrated public sector network in the near future. He said it would enable local government to have points of connectivity, going one step further than the current community interest network (Coin).

"By working together, Lancashire's healthcare community has addressed affordability issues to provide the most innovative and agile technology solutions available to significantly improve our patient services," Hadley added.

The project includes the delivery of wireless, local area network, voice, remote access service and mobile services. The network will connect hospital sites, health centres, clinics and surgeries, mental health and social care departments, prisons and other NHS sites.

Welsh informatics boosted by 'collaborative working'

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 14:36:13 GMT

The chief executive of Informing Healthcare has told HC2010 that Wales has an advantage through its culture of public service

"There's a tradition of collective and collaborative working," said Gwyn Thomas, who is also chief information officer for the Welsh Assembly Government. "The culture is one of looking after each other. If you can tap into that, you can unlock all sorts of other things which are more prosaic on delivering IT systems."

Thomas told the conference in Birmingham on 28 April 2010 that Wales now has all the elements of a national health IT system, and is ready to implement these across Wales. He said that Informing Healthcare will hand this work over to the recently established local health boards. "The good news is, in five years, we have things working, tested and proven," he said.

He said this has been achieved by taking small rapid steps, by working closely with healthcare professionals, and trying to solve specific problems rather than theoretical ones, such as on when and how to share patient data. "We gave control away to the professionals," he said on this, adding that the British Medical Association in Wales has been very supportive.

"This is primarily a people problem, not a technology one," he added. "It's pointless offering more and more security, encryption and technology. You have to build the trust, and that's a contact sport – people talking to each other."

Thomas stressed that Wales has not attempted to build the best possible systems, but ones that work. Referring to someone who had said they had the best system of a kind in the world, and Wales wasn't using it, he replied: "I don't care, it's good enough, it works."

Welsh patient records are based on GP systems, and Thomas said that it was time to focus on getting things that work, rather than specific technologies. "I think the language of EPRs and EHRs has served its purpose," he told the audience. "It's not helpful anymore. We talk about information needed to support patient care."

He said that Informing Healthcare has focused on serving patients. "Keep thinking of Mrs Jones," he said. "We invented the Jones family, riddled with chronic disease. They deserve our sympathy really."

Wales is now combining its IT for health and social care, and extending the national infrastructure concept across the Welsh public sector, initially through its public sector broadband aggregation project. "We're now looking at data storage, common applications," Thomas added. In the next six months, he expects that Wales' local governments will join the project too.

When asked by SmartHealthcare.com how he would tackle England's informatics, he said that the Welsh culture helped, but he also believed that the scale was too big. "I'd go for regional government, actually," he said, rather than treating England as "an amorphous blob" with no local differences. The five National Programme for IT regions, one of which stretched from Hereford to the Wirral, were too big.

He added that England needed a "light touch from the centre," with local managers able to run things: "I would turn the whole management structure on its head."

Get out of backroom, challenges Swindells

Tue, 27 Apr 2010 09:42:55 GMT

The British Computer Society's health chief and former NHS CIO has said that informatics needs to take a leading role in redesigning services

On the opening day of the society's HC2010 conference in Birmingham, Matthew Swindells – head of BCS Health and a former chief information officer of the NHS – told SmartHealthcare.com that informatics professionals are ideally placed to help health and social care services do more with less money.

But to do so, he said they will need to help develop the strategy of their organisations, not simply provide computer systems. "There's a whole culture change, of IT and information departments, stepping forward and saying we will contribute to our organisation," he said on 27 April 2010. "We may see chief information officers becoming chief executive officers, which is vanishingly rare in the NHS today."

Currently, a lot of health service organisations split IT and information, which he said should end, representing "an outdated view of the world".

Swindells said that informatics could help join up care between different types of health organisations and social services. It could play a particular role in reducing unnecessary use of expensive hospital capacity, by helping patients to look after themselves at home through telecare.

He said that many countries use nurses in outbound call centres, who contact elderly people to remind them to take medicines and check on their well being. "The big transformative technique for the health service will be getting older people back into their homes more quickly," said Swindells, and such phone banks can play a big role. "The reality is that there is barely any of this being done in the NHS."

Telecare could also be used to help about 900,000 people who need to test their blood regularly, mostly using hospital out patient departments or GP surgeries to do so. If they had equipment to use at home, and the NHS supported this technology, they would generally test themselves more often as well as saving money. "Technology becomes an enabler, rather than a drag," said Swindells.

He said that concerns over patients' personal data could be overcome by giving people choice and control – then demonstrating the benefits to early adopters. "If you think how e-banking took off, it was done by people being able to opt-in," he said. Users realised advantages and reported them to others, and now online banking is a mainstream technology.

Informatics can also contribute to greater trust in health and social services, Swindells said, by collating data to be made public: "There's a information element in this, in creating the transparency that will help the public hold the NHS to account and add quality."

NHS computers hit by data-stealing malware

Fri, 23 Apr 2010 10:50:17 GMT

More than 1,100 computers across the health service are infected with malware that is easily detected by off-the-shelf security software, according to a vendor

Researchers from anti-virus provider Symantec have been monitoring the Qakbot worm since last May and have documented its behaviour, reports The Register. On 22 April 210, after infiltrating two of the six servers used to collect pilfered data from infected machines, they provided an update that didn't exactly instill confidence in the healthcare system.

"The logs show that there is a significant Qakbot infection on the National Health Service (NHS) network in the UK," the Symantec update states. "This threat has managed to infect over 1,100 separate computers that are spread across multiple subnets within the NHS. We have attempted to contact the affected parties and have no evidence to show that any customer or patient data has been stolen."

Over a two week period, the researchers observed 4 GB of stolen data being funnelled to the monitored servers. Because that represents a fraction of the servers used by Qakbot, the amount of pilfered information is likely much higher.

Qakbot spreads through webpages that install malware by exploiting patched vulnerabilities in Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Apple's QuickTime software. It is able to self-propagate on local networks through file shares. It "moves slowly and with caution, trying not to bring attention to its presence," according to the update.

The malware scours an infected machine's hard drive for internet search histories, banking and payment card information and logon credentials for some dozen websites and then uploads them to one of the six servers. It also records the contents of data stored by a browser's autocomplete feature.

"In a nutshell, if your computer is compromised, every bit of information you type into your browser will be stolen," Symantec researchers wrote. While Qakbot primarily targets home users, plenty of corporate and government machines are infected as well.