GP2GP electronic record transfer is expected to be able to be rolled out to more than 70% of GP practices from the end of this month.
Connecting for Health (CfH) has told EHI Primary Care that it expects to give GP system suppliers EMIS and INPS authority to rollout version 1.1 of GP2GP record transfer by the end of July.
The two suppliers, which between them cover more than 70% of practices in England, have been piloting transfers between EMIS LV and Vision 3 in Croydon Primary Care Trust since March. A spokesperson for CfH said the two companies have met the milestones to enable exchange of records between the two systems .
Sean Riddell, managing director of EMIS, said more than 600 EMIS practices already had GP2GP installed and version 1.1 would be rolled out to the rest of the company’s practices in England once official approval had been received from CfH.
“We’ve got the widescale roll-out plans ready and waiting,” he added. iSoft have submitted their first release of GP2GP software which is going through the CfH clinical safety testing process.
A CfH spokesperson added: “It is still our plan to roll out iSOFT GP2GP to early adopter sites during the last quarter of 2007.” A spokesperson for iSOFT told EHI Primary Care that CfH testers were carrying out interoperability testing between the two iSOFT systems, Premiere and Synergy, and EMIS and INPS, before progressing to the next stage of CfH testing.
He added: “Due to the complexity of this project, the team is taking a rigorous approach to guarantee everything works as planned. Since the outputs of this functionality are posted into the clinical notes, obviously clinical safety is paramount.”
Primary care system supplier TPP announced last month that its system SystmOne had received accreditation for GP2GP record transfers between its own practices (link: http://www.ehiprimarycare.com/news/item.cfm?ID=2803) and that it was now seeking accreditation for Read 2 to Read 3 transfers which would enable SystmOne users to receive records from the majority of other suppliers.
A spokesperson for CfH told EHI Primary Care: “We are working with TPP to ensure that incoming Read 2 transfers and transfers to other Read 3 systems are clinically safe. This work is in its early stages and is expected to run over the next few months.”
TPP told EHI Primary Care that record exchange from practices using Read 3 to Read 2 is possible and it is offering free consultancy to other suppliers.
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