Background

This Roadmap Item relates to the GP Connect Messaging product, where a priority outcome has been identified to support the GP Record being updated with Online Consultation (OC) information.  

COVID-19 response has seen use of online consultation systems in GP practice increase from 30% at beginning of April 2020 to ~90% and OC submissions per week has risen rapidly to approximately 620k consultations (as at end of February 2022). 

There is a lack of OC systems’ integration with GP clinical systems, leading to an increased admin burden for GP practice admin and clinical staff having to (in some cases) manually verify a patient, copy and code all clinically relevant OC information back into the GP Record as part of processing the patient’s OC submission.  

The GPC Messaging specification has been uplifted to enable a greater set of structured information to be captured via additional FHIR resources available for population in the payload.

Outline Plan

Summary of Change

The GP Connect Messaging specification has been uplifted to support the business need to allow information to be captured in OC and sent back to and received by the GP Practice and where appropriate, automatically ingested and added to the patient record.  This will require ingestion of the structured / coded FHIR resources contained in the uplifted specification and implementation of any supporting requirements identified.  

The specification was uplifted to enable sending an online consultation report back to the patient’s registered GP practice, or to a patient selected alternative care provider. Additional FHIR resources were made available for population to support the capture and transfer of structured and SNOMED coded information. This is in order to reduce the manual heavy cut / paste processes currently in place, standardise and improve patient information being sent back to the GP clinical system.  

It is envisaged that the development to support the full GP Connect Messaging uplifted specification will be delivered in several iterations. This roadmap item covers Phase 2 of the 3 proposed phases. Phase 2 will include implementation of additional Online Consultation requirements not addressed in Phase 1. It will also remove the need for sending a PDF document, the result of which will be a fully FHIR structured Online Consultation payload.

For more information on Phase 1 & Phase 3 see: 

• GP Connect Messaging: Send Update for Online Consultation (Phase 1)
• GP Connect Messaging: Send Update rest of record (Phase 3)

Full Specification

Please access the following links for more information on the draft specification for this Roadmap item: 

• GP Connect Messaging 1.5.1 
• GP Connect Messaging 1.6.0 (to be published)

Assurance Approach

NHS Digital will follow a risk-based approach to assurance. A detailed assurance approach will be provided alongside Publication of the relevant specifications.