A significant milestone has been reached in the deployment of National Programme for IT systems to GP practices in the North-east and Eastern clusters.
Local service provider Accenture and systems supplier TPP (The Phoenix Partnership) announced this week that they had completed its two hundredth deployment of SystmOne GP.
There are now 430 GPs live using SystmOne, including 165 GPs that were using it before TPP won the contract with Accenture. These practices have been upgraded to a spine-compliant version of SystmOne.
In addition, some 76 PCTs now have SystmOne Community running, and 48 PCTs have SystmOne Child Health. Accenture saus that in total 4.6 million patient records are now held on the integrated Primary Care (SystmOne) solution.
TPP project manager Helen Springer told EHI Primary Care the rate of GP deployments had reached more than 30 per month.
“We are now seeing practices go through deployment much faster, and that’s thanks to everyone’s involvement in guiding and supporting practices through this process,” she said.
Accenture says that variants of SystmOne are also in use in 80 per cent of the PCTs in the two clusters, with 76 using SystmOne Community and 48 using SystmOne Child Health.
A spokesperson said: “For the first time ever, GPs and community health practitioners have access to a reliable, shared patient record for the local health community that allows them to share information across care groups.”
SystmOne is built around a single, unified database of electronic patient records that is held in a secure application block in St Albans.
Practices communicate with the database over encrypted links, and staff are given access to all or part of a patient’s record when prescribing, reporting or carrying out other tasks.
TPP claims patient records are ‘much safer’ in the central database than on practice systems and stresses that it has state of the art power, monitoring and support systems to ensure ‘maximum uptime.’
The relatively rapid deployment of SystmOne to GPs and community services in the North-east and Eastern contrasts with the relatively slow deployment of new systems to the acute sector.
Ovum analyst Tola Sargeant said deploying GP and community systems seemed to be “one of the areas of focus” for Accenture.
In addition, she said feedback about SystmOne was generally positive, which made practices more comfortable about accepting it. “The more they do, the easier it gets,” she said.