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To support the response to the coronavirus outbreak, NHS Digital has been legally directed to collect and analyse healthcare information about patients, including from their GP record, for the duration of the coronavirus emergency period. See GPES data for pandemic planning and research (COVID-19) for more information.

NHS England and Improvement published a letter on Thursday 19 March 2020  which confirmed that calculations for QOF 2019/2020 will be made as usual.

This data submission will be followed by a piece of analysis to understand the impact of COVID-19 and a one-off financial adjustment for practices who earned less in 2019/20 than 2018/19 as a result of COVID19 activities. Learn more.  

We collect information from GP practices either:

• automatically from the practice clinical records system through the General Practice Extraction Service (GPES); or
• manually directly into the Calculating Quality Reporting Service

This information is used to help practices track and manage their performance against various targets and enhanced services frameworks set for them by NHS England.

Data is used to help track:

• the Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF)
• Direct Enhanced Services (DES)
• Vaccination and Immunisation (V&I)
• the GP workload tool
• the National Diabetes Audit

It forms part of our GP Collections service.

NHS England negotiates GP contracts on an annual basis. Once this is completed, the service information is made available on the CQRS system.

Commissioning organisations, such as the NHS England regional offices, then offer out these services for GP practices to accept.   

Once approved, the aggregated, non-patient identifiable data is shared with CQRS by participating practices. CQRS calculates a Quality Service Achievement based on the data it receives, and relevant payments are made through the National Health Applications and Infrastructure Services (NHAIS) system. 

CQRS training is available as an online training course (CQRS Learning Centre), which includes training courses, job aids, tutorials, and additional resources. You will need to be on the HSCN network (previously known as N3), but log in details are not required.

The CQRS user guides provide detail on how to perform key processes in CQRS. There are guides to submit and declare achievement for payment for each of the Enhanced Services currently available on CQRS.

Throughout the year, the Calculating Quality Reporting Service (CQRS) releases team deploy a number of releases to introduce enhancements and fix problems. Read more about when these releases are scheduled on the CQRS releases page.