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Digital

Online and Video Consultation undertaken in General Practice

Summary

Why and how we process your data in the Online and Video Consultation undertaken in General Practice and your rights.

Controller NHS England (in relation to the means by which the personal data is processed) and the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) (in relation to determining the purposes for which the data is processed through the issuing of a Direction to NHS England)
How we use the information (processing activities)

The NHS Long Term Plan sets out a vision to offer digital first primary care to all patients in England by 2024. Following the COVID-19 pandemic there has been an acceleration in the adoption of total triage and of online and video consultation tools in general practice.

The OC/VC data collection will provide vital information both to practices and local commissioners on how OC/VC functionalities are being used by patients and general practices. It will enable targeting of implementation support and will help to support understanding of demand and activity in general practice.

The data will provide the following benefits to general practices, commissioners, and suppliers:

  • Improve the capture of OC/VC activity to provide a more complete picture of demand and workload
  • Auto-extract meaningful metrics directly from OC/VC system suppliers without burdening practices
  • Enable the use of data to focus resources and support for the implementation of OC/VC tools and optimisation of digital first pathways as part of wider primary care transformation
  • Enable informed and value-based commissioning of online and video consultation products
  • Monitor and drive product development to deliver the right outcomes for general practice
  • Standardise reporting from OC/VC suppliers for consistency and comparison of products and to ensure all suppliers, which are on the relevant Framework, contribute to data collections
  • Enable near real time monitoring of outcomes to drive a continuous service improvement approach, benefitting patients, staff and the wider system
  • Extract data items that would not otherwise be available from other national data collections or from general practice clinical systems
  • Enable analysis of access to OC/VC services by various protected characteristics in order to promote equality and reduce health inequalities
  • Ensure publication of the data by NHS England aligns with the ‘Data Saves Lives’ strategy which has a strong focus on transparency and how data is used. Publication also supports increased use of the data which will drive data quality and consistency
Does this contain sensitive (special category) data such as health information? Yes
Who are recipients of this data?

None 
Is data transferred outside the UK? This data is not transferred out of the UK
How long the data is kept 20 years in line with the NHS Records Management Code of Practice
Our lawful basis for holding this data Legal obligation
Your rights
  • Tick Be informed
  • Tick Get access to it
  • Tick Rectify or change it
  • Cross Erase or remove it
  • Tick Restrict or stop processing it
  • Cross Move, copy or transfer it
  • Cross Object to it being processed or used
  • Cross Know if a decision was made by a computer rather than a person
How can you withdraw your consent?

Consent is not the basis for the processing
Is the data subject to decisions made solely by computers? (automated decision making) No
Where does this data come from? General practices in England which have accepted the offer to participate in the service on the Calculating Quality Reporting Service (CQRS)
The legal basis for collecting this data

NHS England's lawful basis for processing (collecting and analysing) personal data is:

UK GDPR Article 6(1)(c) - processing is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation to which the controller is subject (Online and Video Consultation Directions 2021)

NHS England's lawful basis for processing (collecting and analysing) special categories of personal data is:

UK GDPR Article 9(2)(g) - reasons of substantial public interests, supplemented by:

Data Protection Act 2018, Schedule 1, Part 2, Paragraph 6 - 'statutory etc and government purposes'

UK GDPR Article 9(2)(h) - management of health or social care systems and services, supplemented by:

Data Protection Act 2018, Schedule 1, Part 1, Paragraph 2(2)(f) – ‘the management of health care systems or services or social care systems or services’.

Where we use this data