GP Connect

The GP Connect programme is looking at how we develop our products. We’ve had feedback that sharing tasks and actions between primary care and other settings would be of benefit – especially in the context of Primary Care Networks and Integrated Care Networks. 

We are hosting two webinars to present our findings and to seek further input to the following questions:

• How are tasks requested? 
• What are the problems areas? 

Our objective is to better understand the challenges around how health and care organisations share actions for patient’s health care. 

Webinar 1 - How are tasks and actions shared now? - 2 July 2020 14:00 – 15:00

Our first webinar will share scenarios and personas and how tasks and actions are currently shared between health care settings. We would recommend that if you are planning to join any of these webinars that you start with this one to understand the concepts we will be discussing.

Webinar 2 - A map of challenges and needs in sharing tasks - 9 July 14:00 – 15:00

The second webinar will discuss a map of challenges and user needs in sharing of tasks and actions between various health care settings that interface with primary care.

Register for these webinars.

The GP Connect team are in the initial stages of planning and research for the future development of the product and potential creation of new products. To help us to make the very best products to support wider use of GP Connect, we need input from you to help us shape what comes next.

We’re particularly interested in the needs of Primary Care Networks and Integrated Care Services, but we welcome input from a wide group of roles and professionals, so whether you’re delivering care or building systems if you’re interested in using digital tools to improve patient outcomes we have a team waiting to speak to you.

If you would like to get involved in shaping the future of interoperable healthcare, please send us your contact details and a brief summary of your role to GPconnect@nhs.net.

We’ve enabled GP Connect on EMIS and TPP GP clinical systems to meet the operational requirements of the Covid Clinical Assessment Service (CCAS).

GP practices need to configure GP Connect to allow appointment sharing with CCAS so patients suspected of suffering from coronavirus (COVID-19) can be referred to their GP.

We are working with Microtest and Vision to have this functionality available on their GP clinical systems.

Find out what you need to do to get appointment sharing working.

We have listened to feedback from people using the Access Record: HTML product. As a result, we will be introducing changes to the layout and content of some of the HTML views you’re used to seeing. These focus on the Medications, Problems and Issues, and Summary Views.

As what you see is determined by your system owner, what you see will vary but the changes being made will provide additional information where it was missing and some restructuring of existing data to improve visibility. For example, on Summary View, you told us that having the patient’s last three consultations information visible at the top of the page would be better. So that’s what we’re doing.

You can find out more about the specific changes being made on the Access Record HTML 0.7.2 upgrade page.

This follows extensive First of Type testing of the capability.

With this development, GP Connect Appointment Management is now available across the TPP and EMIS estate in England – approximately 95 per cent of the market. This is a significant step in how GP Connect’s support for the Improving Access to GP Practices agenda.  Appointment Management will make it simpler for primary care networks to view and book appointments for patients across the network. It also supports appointment bookings via supporting services such as NHS 111.

The GP Connect team is looking forward to supporting this series of events being organised by NHS England and NHS Improvement. These free sessions are designed to help GP Practices prepare for the direct booking of some GP appointments from NHS 111 which will start to be available from October. The events are listed below and you can read more information on the event webpage.

Direct booking of some urgent GP appointments from NHS 111 will start to become available from October 2019. NHS England and NHS Improvement are working with practices across the country to make sure they are ready for the change, including overcoming the technical issues some practices may face.

Events are taking place in:

• London, 10 October 2019, Amba Hotel Marble Arch
• Birmingham 14 October 2019, The Birmingham Botanical Gardens
• Leeds, 22 October 2019, Cloth Hall Court, Well Met
• London, 28 October 2019, Mary Ward House
• South West, 29 October 2019, Bristol Marriott
• Manchester area, 20 November 2019, Midland Hotel

The GP Connect team is pleased to announce that Full Rollout Approval has been achieved with TPP for their Appointment Management capability in support of the GP Connect Programme.

Appointment Management is an important deliverable for GP Connect in support of the Improving Access to GP Practices agenda. Appointment Management will make it simpler for primary care networks to view and book appointments for patients across the network. It also supports appointment bookings via supporting services such as NHS 111.

At GP Connect, we recently asked for feedback on how we should prioritise the 12 clinical areas we had identified for the development of our Access Record: Structured capability.

The results of our survey are now in and we are grateful for those of you who participated. We also wanted to share these and to update you on how this has informed our development priorities.

The good news is that Problems, Consultations, Uncategorised Data and Immunisations ranked high in your priorities and we already have a detailed specification for these that we published at the end of June 2019.

Pathology, Documents and Outbound Referrals were also identified as high priority and a specification is due to be published for these by the end of September 2019.

The remaining areas including ‘Flags/Alerts, Appointments, Test Requests, Diary Entry, Demographics, Patient Consent and Incoming referrals’ will be completed, and a specification published by the end of December 2019.

Our decision-making process considered which capabilities would provide maximum clinical benefit as well as your feedback.

Please note:  Meds and Allergies was ranked number one priority. The specification for this has already been published  and build with a number of suppliers is in an advanced state.

Please contact us at gpconnect@nhs.net should you have any questions relating to this.

EMIS has achieved full roll-out approval for their Access Record: HTML capability as part of the GP Connect programme for their EMIS Web clinical system.

This is another  important step in delivering the government's vision of better supporting clinical care by opening up information and data held within GP Practice IT core systems. More information will follow soon.

We are delighted to announce that TPP has become the first GP system supplier to achieve full roll-out approval for Access Record: HTML as part of NHS Digital’s GP Connect programme. The programme ensures that staff across the NHS can access vital information from GP practice records.

This full roll-out approval marks a major step forward for the GP Connect programme and the national interoperability initiative. It will help to deliver better care for patients across care settings and improve coordination between staff working across primary care networks.

GP Connect Access Record: HTML is now integrated with the Adastra clinical patient management system. This means 111 and Integrated Urgent Care (IUC) service providers will be able to view a patient’s up-to-date record held by their own GP and given access to a range of important information about a patient including encounters, allergies, medications, referrals and more.

Find out more about GP Connect Access Record: HTML