Someone in the Department of Health is an optimist, or has a wicked sense of humour. At a time of unrelenting bad news about NHS IT computerisation, and growing concern – including among doctors' leaders – about the government assuming new powers to share medical data, the DoH is asking the public what it thinks of plans to extend massively the personal information it holds on joined-up databases. Your employment, mental capacity and the names of your pets are among the data items that may appear on IT systems designed to bridge the gap between hospitals and home care.

Make no mistake, some kind of system is needed. Almost everyone who works in social care, or has had a family member go through the process, can tell stories of communication breakdowns between NHS medical teams and local authority community care teams. At best, this means waste and frustration as staff have to collect the same information over and over again; at worst it means people get the wrong care – or none at all.

The department's solution is something called the common assessment framework for adults. A 96-page document, entitled "A consultation on proposals to improve information sharing around multi-disciplinary assessment and care planning," has appeared on the DoH website for your comments.

Although official minds are in theory open, the consultation is based on the clear presumption that information sharing is a good thing. The aim is that:

Ultimately, every locality should seek to have a single community based support system focused on the health and wellbeing of the local population. Binding together local government, primary care, community based health provision, public health, social care and the wider issues of housing, employment, benefits advice and education/training. This will not require structural changes, but organisations coming together to re-design local systems around the needs of citizens.

The system will be supported by: "mechanisms to hold and share information securely and appropriately between electronic care records across the NHS, social services and, subsequently, other organisations involved in care and support".

Attractive as the idea is to the bureaucratic mind, integrating NHS and social care records is a process that should be handled with care. As the NHS in England has painfully discovered, computerising health records, even within the confines of a hospital department, is a far more subtle and complex process than the IT industry would have us believe. Adding social care information to the mix adds a massive layer of complexity. Unresolved difficulties include the coding of subjective information about an individual's wellbeing or mental capacity, and questions of access and consent.

The government will mumble that there's nothing really new in these proposals, that the NHS electronic health record was always supposed to extend into social care, and that if anything the common assessment framework will increase security rather than put it under threat. These assertions should not go unchallenged.

The consultation runs to 17 April. Let's make the most of it.