The non-profit Foundation for Information Policy Research (FIPR) claims in a statement that the creation of such a database is unecessary, since a database containing patients' personal information, along with records of payments made for their hospital treatment, already exists.
There are also other databases, the FIPR says, available to ministers and civil servants, which contain enough information to identify the "vast majority" of patients.
According to the FIPR, the NHS "should instead concentrate on preventing existing abuse." The group cites an anti-fraud pilot scheme in one health authority that exposed 30 unauthorised information requests per week.
"This suggests", the FIPR considers, "that over 200,000 attempts are made every year to get health information on patients, by investigators who call up pretending to be doctors or administrators."
The group claims that most of these attempts currently succeed.
The group accuses NHS managers of shelving the scheme launched by the British Medical Association in 1996 which required that telephone requests for patient information should be logged, approved and authenticated.
This scheme would have prevented unauthorised individuals from gaining access to patients' data, the FIPR says.
The FIPR's statement concludes:
"Patients entrust some of their most sensitive personal information to their doctors. NHS managers should not be trying to undermine that trust by spreading identifiable patient data around the health service bureaucracy and the civil service.
"The NHS must modernise their systems to protect rather than undermine patients' privacy. Otherwise they risk the trust between patient and doctor that is vital for effective healthcare."
The plans for centralising its resources are part of a £3 billion government programme to modernise the NHS IT systems. The NHS authorities have claimed that a centralised database would make cross-checking of patient's information and the detection of fraud easier.