Health information firm Dr Foster Intelligence is making hospital referral data in its practice based commissioning tool available free to GPs for a 30 day trial period.
The company’s online practice based commissioning software provides GPs with activity data and financial statements for their practices plus benchmarking data for other practices in the same primary care trust and other information including trends on income, diagnoses, procedures and length of stay. Information is taken from the NHS-wide Clearing Service and Hospital Episode Statistics.
The company is selling its web-based software application to primary care trusts or GP practices. The cost to individual practices is 25p per patient per year.
Practices interested in taking advantage of the free trial can register online – the offer runs out on 5 July.
PCTs are expected to provide practices with monthly activity and financial information from NWCS from April 2006 and have been provided with a template to do so although the guidance says other methods can also be used.
Latest guidance from the British Medical Association’s GP committee suggests that practices need to sample and validate the PCT information they receive.
The guidance says this work should include checking the hospital coding against the actual treatment received by the patient following GP referral and suggests that individual practices or consortia consider employing an individual specifically to carry out this work.
It says the reasons why data validation is vital include ensuring that indicative PBC budgets are fair and correct, identifying accurately where savings can be made, identifying inaccurate coding or inappropriate activity and identifying where clinical behaviour within practices could be improved.
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