The General Medical Services GP Contract requires practices to use GP2GP for transferring electronic health records.

Patients expect GPs to have their medical records for their first consultation at the new practice. With GP2GP, the record arrives straight after the registration. In comparison, paper medical records can take weeks or months to arrive.

GP2GP also means practices can support the Health Secretary's objective that patients should have digital records that follow them around the health and social care system.

GP2GP is a three-stage process.

1. The first stage is to register the new patient on the clinical system and perform a Personal Demographics Service search, to see if the patient has an entry on the Spine. A successful search and match will request their electronic health record to be sent.
2. The second stage, sending, is automated and usually takes no more than a couple of minutes.
3. Once the record is received, the third stage is to integrate or file the record into the clinical system. This makes it available for use within the practice and also informs the sending practice if they need to print copies of the record or attachments, before they send the Lloyd George envelope to the new practice.

Integration should be performed promptly, whilst degrades and medication authorisation can be completed later, by summarisers or clinicians. The patient's new and old GP practices currently both need to be in England and each to be live with GP2GP.

Monthly GP2GP utilisation report

The GP2GP team produces a monthly GP2GP utilisation report for CCGs and CSUs, which shows every practice in England that is in scope to use GP2GP.

Each practice's requesting, sending and integration activity is shown and colour-coded. Utilisation levels allow identification of high, medium and low utilisation. Subscribe to receive a monthly copy by email.

Utilisation trending tool

The utilisation trending tool helps CCGs to trend practice behaviour over a period of months, by feeding in data from individual monthly GP2GP utilisation reports.

This is the latest GP2GP stats dashboard:

• 99% of England's 7,581 practices are live with GP2GP
• 10,113,160 GP2GP requests sent since 2007. A request for the electronic health record is generated when a new patient is correctly registered at their new practice
• 7,880,040 patient electronic health records transferred by GP2GP to the patient's new GP since 2007
• 5,275,251 patient electronic health records integrated since 2011. (Data on record integration could not be collected before 2011). Integration occurs when the new practice files the incoming electronic health record
• 47% of received records are integrated the same day that practices receive them, whilst 75% are integrated within seven days of receipt, supporting printing reduction for leaving patients

• Full electronic health record available for the patient's first and subsequent consultations. This improves continuity of care for on-going medical conditions
• No need for patients to provide a detailed account of their previous medical history to their new clinician, as the integrated electronic health record is visible
• Safer prescribing provided by access to the patient's current and past medication and to any recorded allergies and adverse reactions
• Repeat medication details will be available for the patient's first medication review with the new GP
• GP2GP allows the NHS to preserve the usability of rich data accumulated in patient records