Background

GP Practices receive Patient data from a variety of external services/sources (e.g. Pharmacists) in an unstructured way, such as via email or in an inconsistent format (e.g. free text). As a result, the Health or Care Professional needs to enter that data into the GPIT systems manually in order for it to be added to the Patient’s GP record.

Manual data entry adds administration burden on the practice staff, GPIT systems, services, and General Practices, resulting in Health or Care Professionals having less time for Patients, affecting their ability to provide care. Manual data entry also presents an opportunity for human error in the transcribing of information such as medications which could have detrimental impacts on patient care and outcomes.

Sending Supplier Solutions must have the ability to send structured data for any encounters with patients that have taken place, including any restrictions to consent to onward share, information for medications and initial triage observations.

Foundation Supplier Solutions must have the ability to consume structured data that has been sent. The structured data also needs to be added to the Patient Record.

This capability will reduce the need for manual data entry, improve the quality of information available in the Patient Record and reduce the burden on GP Practice Users.

The first use case for this functionality is Community Pharmacy.

Outline Plan

Open

Summary of Change

Full Specification

• GP Connect Standard v5.1.0

• Patient Information Maintenance - GP v5.1.0

Assurance Approach

Assurance of the GP systems (i.e., recipients of the Update Record) will follow the Solution Assurance (SA) risk-based assurance approach. Suppliers will be provided in advance of onboarding for assurance, a SA Risk log listing risk items for the technical Interoperability, functional, non-functional, clinical, Information Governance and Security areas pertaining to this roadmap item. The SA Risk log will also explicitly state for each of the risk items in the risk log as to what are the risk mitigations expected from an onboarding GP system Supplier from a testing perspective. The GP system suppliers will also be provided access to the ITK Toolkit Workbench (TKW) test tooling for testing with their systems to mitigate the identified technical interoperability risks where possible to do so with the test tooling. Suppliers will also be provided with a manual test pack containing high level generic (i.e., system agnostic) test scenarios for risks items which cannot be tested using the ITK TKW test tooling. GP system suppliers are accountable for the testing of their solution and are expected to have also developed their internal test suite in addition to the SA supplied test tooling and test packs as these are supplier system agnostic and cannot be expected to cover specific supplier system functionality. There will be some risk items which would be more appropriate to assure through online demonstration sessions setup by the supplier and these would be explicitly specified in the SA risk log . The completed SA risk log submission from the supplier with all the completed risk mitigation asks would be reviewed and signed off by Solution assurance in conjunction with the Direct Care APIs Programme. 

As part of the assurance, there will also be a Programme and SA co-ordinated end to end testing activity between an onboarding pharmacy system supplier and an onboarding GP system supplier to identify and fix any issues before going LIVE, which could not be potentially detected earlier when testing and assuring systems in isolation. 

Please note that the established clinical safety assurance process would have to be followed in addition to the above assurance and clinical witness testing is likely to be required in order to prove that information sent is consumed and auto-ingested correctly.