Primary Care Registration Management

Primary Care Registration Management (PCRM) is a back-end service that enables patients to register with a GP practice and thus access GP services.

It provides a way for the patient's GP registration to be co-ordinated amongst:

• the patient's new GP system
• the patient's old GP system
• the Personal Demographics Service (PDS) - the national service that holds the patient's demographic details, including their address and registered GP

It works alongside the following other GP registration services:

• Register with a GP surgery - for patients to register with a GP online
• GP2GP - for transferring the patient's GP record from the old GP to the new GP 

As well as handling GP registration, PCRM also:

• allows GP systems to update the patient's address in PDS
• supports the 'capitation' GP payments process by providing details of registered GPs to Primary Care Support England.

PCRM is replacing the GP registrations elements of National Health Application and Infrastructure Services (NHAIS). The two services are currently running in parallel, with some geographical regions using PCRM and some using on NHAIS, and with more regions being migrated each month. Once the migration is complete, NHAIS GP registrations will be retired.

PCRM is a back-end service - nobody uses it directly. Rather, it is used by GP systems as part of the GP registration process.

Once fully rolled out, PCRM will be used across the whole of England, Wales, Isle of Man and the Defence Medical Services (DMS).

PCRM is mandatory for all GP systems in England, and is supported by our legal directions.

GP systems can send patient address updates to PCRM via NHAIS GP Links.

If PCRM isn't able to process a request automatically for some reason, it marks it for manual attention.

Such cases are resolved by the PDS National Back Office team using the Demographic Spine Application (DSA).

PCRM generates reports on patients' registered GPs and sends them to Primary Care Support England via MESH.

PCRM is live.

It was first launched in February 2022 for people in male prisons, and we are currently working to migrate each of the 89 NHAIS instances across to PCRM. At the time of writing (December 2022) we have completed four NHAIS instances and we hope to have completed them all by July 2024.

PCRM is a silver service, meaning it is operational 24 hours a day, 365 days a year but only supported during business hours (8am to 6pm), Monday to Friday excluding bank holidays.

We are working to roll out PCRM across the whole of England, Wales and the Isle of Man.

We expect this to be complete some time in 2024.

For more details, contact us.

To integrate a GP system with PCRM, use the NHAIS GP Links integration.

The following table shows how to contact us about this service.

The following services are related to PCRM: