Onboarding requirements

Organisations and suppliers must complete onboarding before they can use GP Connect products. The process includes confirming prerequisites, submitting a use case, developing and testing systems where required, and completing assurance activities before go-live.

1. Find out if you already meet the prerequisites

Review the prerequisites required for GP Connect assurance on our consumer portal.

2. Contact NHS England to express an interest

The GP Connect team requires an example use case to assess how you plan to use GP Connect APIs and the business issue you are looking to address.

You may find it useful to read the GP Connect specifications for developers and our support hub to know which product is right for your user case.  

You can submit your use case directly to the GP Connect team by completing a use case submission form.

Following the approval of a use case, development work should be started within 6 months of use case approval. If this date is missed, a review or new submission of the use case will be required. Changes or additional development will also require a review or new use case submission.

Once your use case has been received, we will respond within 14 calendar days. Subject to approval of the use case, the next steps are:

• The GP Connect team will support you through the assurance process through to go live. A GP Connect team service practitioner will discuss the assurance process and artefacts with you to help you understand the requirements
• Development work should be started within 6 months of use case approval. If this date is missed, a review or new submission of the use case will be required. Changes or additional development will also require a review or new use case submission.

3. Develop against the relevant specifications

Complete your development of the GP Connect capabilities you want to use. Supporting materials are available with our specifications.

Find out the current, upcoming, and archived versions of the GP Connect specifications for developers.

We have developed an internet-facing system demonstrator to help with your development and initial testing.

When the development has been completed, we need evidence of your development in the form of example interactions between your system and our demonstrator.

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4. Test in the NHS England integration environment

Once we've confirmed your evidence, you can access the NHS England integration environment to test your consumer system against the full end-to-end NHS England system, including Personal Demographics Service (PDS) and Spine Directory Service (SDS) integration.

The test evidence from integration will be used to complete your Supplier Conformance Assessment List (SCAL). The SCAL is a technical document used to assure all consumer suppliers against the NHS England API Specifications. The SCAL, with associated test evidence, is then submitted to NHS England's Solutions Assurance Team to review and approve the document.

In the integration environment, you'll need to test against each of the GP provider systems you expect to consume in live. A statement confirming that this testing has been completed is required by NHS England's Solutions Assurance Team.

5. Technical conformance

When your SCAL has been approved, NHS England's Solutions Assurance Team will create and issue a Technical Conformance Certificate to finalise the assurance process.

The Technical Conformance Certificate gives you the approval to deploy your consumer product in conjunction with an NHS Commissioner.

6. The First of Type (FoT) process

The SCAL process does not dictate a pilot/beta phase for consumer systems. We will take a risk-based approach and may impose an in-live assessment phase where the system will be assessed on:

• clinical safety – checking there’s no risk in using this product in a clinical setting
• information governance – protecting patient data to agreed high standards
• technical conformance – how well it works with other systems
• whether it does what it was designed to do

7. Deployment activities

• communication to stakeholders
• benefits baseline and plan for realisation
• overview of the product, training materials and business change
• ensure that the correct roles are assigned to users
• understand how to manage consent where appropriate for the product.
• implementation plan
• signing of the National Data Sharing Arrangement (NDSA)
• end point configuration

Our Direct Care APIs team manage the GP Connect programme. Their role is to:

• publish specifications for the GP Connect capability application programming interfaces (APIs) - APIs are built into provider and consumer systems and allow data to be shared between different IT systems
• provide clinical and technical assurance of provider systems against the published specifications
• provide technical assurance of consumer systems to the published specifications and publish a list of approved systems
• define processes for onboarding to use GP Connect products
• provide local implementation managers to support GP Connect projects - you can email [email protected] to find out who your local contact is
• publish information about the approved use case for each consumer system, outlining the purpose for which they have GP Connect access

You can email the GP Connect team at [email protected].

• How GP Connect works
• When to use GP Connect
• Compliance and governance requirements
• Implementation and integration