Background

It is well understood that Practice migrations are burdensome for Practices and create additional work and downtime for the Practice, which impacts Patient care and the level of service the Practice can deliver during the migration.

It is NHS England’s intention to prove that a migration can happen without the need for an extended cutover period. To achieve this NHS England are looking to prove that Foundation Suppliers can use APIs, or other technical means, to keep their Target Solution up to date with the current Source Solution, removing the need for the Source Supplier to provide an extract. The intention is that this will allow the new Foundation Solution to simply be switched on and the old Solution made read only over a weekend period.

Work is ongoing at NHS England to standardise the migration process, including the creation of a data standard that is built on GP Connect profiles to transfer data between Suppliers, allowing for a standardised process that is Supplier agnostic. APIs are currently proposed as the method of obtaining the data, which would be similar to those used in GP Connect. NHS England is however aware that Suppliers may have alternative solutions and are happy to explore a different method that achieves the desired outcome.

Outline Plan

• A full breakdown of costs to be provided to the Catalogue Authority for approval, prior to commencement of the work

• Suppliers to deliver both the Target and Source Solution requirements

• Assurance to be completed in-line with the Assurance Approach documented on this Roadmap Item

  • Assurance Milestone 1 - Technical Conformance

  • Assurance Milestone 2 - Clinical Authority To Release (CATR)

• This migration approach is to be used for all future migrations where both Target and Source Solution Supplier are compliant with these requirements

• These MAY requirements are intended to become a MUST in the future

Summary of Change

Full Specification

The updated Data Migration Standard will be added at a later date. Proposed changes can be viewed in the Summary of Change above.

Assurance Approach

Assurance Milestone 1 - Technical Conformance (incentivised)

The Supplier will be required to provide a detailed document submission of their proposal, along with an online session to walkthrough as to how each of the requirements (DMI28 and DMI29) in this Roadmap Item will be met from a technical, operational and service perspective, as either a Source Solution System (SSS) or as a Target Solution System (TSS).

As an integral part of the above process, the Source Solution Supplier (SSS) will have to 

• Provide complete technical details of their API interface or Data Transfer Mechanism (DTM) for review

• Demonstrate the implementation in a test environment, for the purposes of assurance by the Technical, Clinical, Information Governance, Security and Service Management stakeholders

• Complete an initial extract from their Live environment using their API interface or Data Transfer Mechanism (DTM), which has been validated by the Target Solution Supplier (i.e. successful ingesting, processing and validation of the extract for data integrity)

Assurance Milestone 2 - Clinical Authority To Release (CATR)

The Supplier will be required to prove the technical capability of their API interface or Data Transfer Mechanism (DTM) as part of a First of Type (FoT) migration both as a Source Solution System (SSS) and as a Target Solution System (TSS).

The FoT GP Practice (i.e., the service recipient) stakeholders would also be engaged for review and feedback, prior to and during the first of type (FOT) migration.

Clinical Safety approvals would also be required from the CSOs in the SSS organisation, TSS organisation, GP Practice (i.e. Service Recipient) Organisation and NHS England, both for FOT entry and for FOT exit, to secure Clinical Authority To Release (CATR).