Two hosted GP practice systems have so far received accreditation from NHS Connecting for Health.
INPS Vision 3 Enterprise edition, as offered by the Capital Care Alliance in the London cluster and iSoft Synergy Enterprise, as offered by Accenture in the North Eastern and Eastern clusters, have met CfH’s requirements for hosted systems under the IM&T directed enhanced service (DES).
Accreditation means practices which have migrated to these systems can be paid retrospectively under the DES according to interim guidance issued jointly by CfH, NHS Employers and the British Medical Association’s General Practitioner Committee (GPC).
The IM&T DES includes four components of which the fourth, worth 22p per patient, is that practices should migrate to a CfH approved hosted system. The other three components are the production of a plan showing how a practice will move towards the other targets in the DES (component one) , achieving data accreditation (component two) and use of the electronic transmission of prescriptions service and use of approved address validation policies and procedures (component three). Payment of components two, three and four is also dependent on the agreed plan in component one being in place.
The guidance, written for primary care organisations, also sets out the key dates for the DES which will run for two years to March 31, 2008. It says practices must apply to their PCOs for inclusion in the DES before February 1, 2007, and arrangements for a plan to be submitted to PCOs by an agreed data must be in place by February 15, 2007.
To take part in the data accreditation component practices must have been formally accredited by their PCOs as paper light.
Facilitators from the primary care data quality service PRMIS+ or their equivalent will be required to help practices meet the data standards and PCOs without PRIMIS+ trained facilitators can obtain free training in facilitation for their staff.
An electronic audit will be used to test data accreditation standards in practices and the guidance says the e-audit queries, written in MIQUEST, are being piloted and will be published and made available for download when validated.
Assessors will also visit practices to qualitatively assess the quality of the recording of the notes against the standards after the e-audit. PCOs will be expected to recruit assessors for component two and the guidance says assessors should have clinical knowledge at GP or nurse practitioner level and good health informatics skills.
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