Background

When a Patient moves from one GP Practice to another, the new GP Practice assumes immediate responsibility for the Patient, and their records should be available in full, without obstruction, to the treating Health or Care Professional at the point of care. The current process is: 

1. New GP Practice registers the Patient

2. Upon registration, the clinical system uses GP2GP to request and receive the Patient’s Electronic Patient Record (EPR) from their previous GP Practice. This is automated and usually takes no more than a couple of minutes

3. The new GP Practice manually integrates (also referred to as ‘filing’) the received EPR. This makes it available for use within the GP Practice and informs the sending GP Practice if they need to print copies of the EPR or missing attachments

The third step introduces unnecessary delay and administrative burden if Patient Records are not integrated promptly. The process to manually integrate an incoming GP2GP has been reassessed and this process can be automated. This Roadmap Item change will remove the need for GP Practice Users to manually integrate the Patient Records and will automate the integration.

Automatic integration of GP2GP records at the point of transfer will ensure that:

• Health or Care Professionals can access the full EPR at the point of care

• GP2GP records are received immediately when a new GP Practice assumes responsibility for a Patient and cannot be obstructed by administrative processes of the previous GP Practice

All subsequent new Patient tasks and workflows, such as medication authorisation, resolving degrades etc will remain unaffected. 

Outline Plan

All Foundation Suppliers must be compliant against this specification by the Effective Date. Prior to going live Suppliers must have completed the Solution Assurance by NHSE.

Suppliers should contact the team when they are ready to start development. The team can be contacted at gp2gp@nhs.net

Summary of Change

Full Specification

GP2GP v5.0.0

Patient Information Maintenance - GP v6.0.0

Assurance Approach

• NHSE will apply a risk based approach to Test & Assurance

• Suppliers will be asked to identify risks (Functional and Non-Functional) and demonstrate sufficient mitigations against those risks

• Collaborative workshops will be held between Suppliers and NHSE / Solutions Assurance to identify, agree and rate risks – there will also be ‘clinical’ involvement

• Risk Mitigations will be agreed between Supplier and NHSE

• Risk Mitigations will be evidenced and provided to NHSE for sign-off (eg. evidence, explanation, screenshots and/or demonstrations)

• NHSE will review Supplier testing scope, coverage and risk mitigation evidence

• Some functional assurance may be performed by the NHSE Solutions Assurance team, where deemed appropriate

• Some Assurance and Test assistance may be provided by the NHSE Solutions Assurance team (eg. where data is required for testing or where other GP Foundation Supplier systems are required to support interoperable integration testing)