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Creating a new NHS England: NHS England and NHS Digital merged on 1 February 2023. More about the merger.

Use GP Connect in your organisation

We are helping clinicians gain appropriate access to patient records during interactions away from the registered practice. Our products allow and primary care organisations to share appointments with other practices and NHS 111 to make it simpler for patients to see a GP at a suitable time and location.

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GP Connect: Access record

GP Connect: Access Record allows authorised clinicians to access GP patient records held on their practice system. Access Record has two methods of retrieving data from the patient record:

  1. Access Record: HTML enables a read-only view of a patient’s record regardless of the practice clinical system. The record can be viewed within another care setting including another GP practice, an urgent care call centre, or an acute care organisation via an accredited system or application.
  2. Access Record: Structured provides access to a patient’s record in a machine-readable, structured, and coded format. Structured data allows the consuming system to import and process patient data provided that it's only used for direct care, and the system meets the specified GP Connect consumer requirements, including information governance and clinical safety standards.

Read more about GP Connect: Access Record.

GP Connect: Send Document

GP Connect: Send Document provides a simple and standardised way of updating a patient record. It sends a summary of a consultation that may have taken place away from the patient's registered practice. Each message sent using Send Document makes use of the GP Connect Messaging components ITK3, and MESH to deliver the message.

Read more about GP Connect: Send Document.

GP Connect: Appointment Management

GP Connect: Appointment Management is used to book appointments on behalf of a patient into their registered practice or another care setting. This is useful for services such as NHS 111 and is being used to manage appointments for the COVID-19 vaccination programme.

Read more about GP Connect: Appointment Management.

GP Connect is for direct patient care

GP Connect products can help people share, view or act on information that they are legally entitled to access, but cannot do so easily because they are using different IT systems.

GP Connect APIs can only be used legally for direct patient care, not for planning or research.

Direct patient care is defined as a clinical, social, or public health activity concerned with the prevention, investigation, and treatment of illness and the alleviation of suffering of individuals. It includes:

  • supporting individuals’ ability to function and improve their participation in life and society
  • making sure care and treatment is safe and of high quality through local audits, managing when things go wrong, and working to improve satisfaction by measuring patient outcomes 

Users of GP systems

GP systems users are the organisations that hold registered patient records and are the source of the shared data. GP systems can be configured to receive appointment bookings or consultation summaries from different care settings.

GP Connect supports greater flexibility in how primary care networks (PCNs) operate by enabling records to be viewed and updated, and for appointment booking between practices regardless of GP IT systems in use.

GP Connect has a team of local implementation managers to support GP Connect projects and offer practical advice in the use of GP Connect in your organisation. You can email gpconnect@nhs.net to find out who your local contact is.

Users in other care settings

There are organisations that want to view patient records, make bookings on behalf of a patient or send a consultation summary following a patient interaction. The systems used in these settings are referred to as Consumers or, in the case of Update Record, as message senders. Dependent on the use case, multiple organisations can use a combination of GP Connect capabilities to allow interoperable working within a locality, usually including GP practices that hold the patient record.

Examples of organisations that may wish to use GP connect capabilities include:

  • hospices
  • social care
  • GP hubs/PCNs/integrated care systems (ICSs)
  • ambulance trusts/services
  • acute and emergency care service providers
  • NHS 111 service providers
  • care homes
  • pharmacies
  • allied health care professionals (community)
  • optometrists
  • dentistry
  • secondary care (hospitals) – elective care
  • mental health trusts 

If the organisation you represent is not on the above list, but you have a GP Connect use case, please contact us at gpconnect@nhs.net.

Multiple Consumer/Sender systems have developed and deployed GP Connect capabilities that are ready to use. For more guidance please contact your supplier. See our GP Connect supplier progress page for a list of which suppliers have developed GP Connect capabilities.

GP Connect has a team of local implementation managers to support GP Connect projects and offer practical advice in the use of GP Connect in your organisation. You can email gpconnect@nhs.net to find out who your local contact is.

Further information

internal GP Connect: Access Record

GP Connect: Access Record makes patient medical information available to all appropriate clinicians when and where they need it to support direct patient care, leading to improvements in both care and outcomes.

internal GP Connect: Send Document

The GP Connect: Send Document provides the capability for a patient’s registered GP practice to receive a document capturing the details of a care encounter following a patient being seen in another care setting.

internal GP Connect: Appointment Management

We're helping primary care organisations share appointments with other care settings such as extended access hubs, NHS 111 and COVID vaccination hubs to improve patient care.

Last edited: 21 June 2022 5:03 pm