By Nick Heath, 27 February 2008 16:27
NEWS
More than a third of doctor's surgeries in England have now adopted an electronic health records system as part of the £12.4bn NHS national IT programme.
The GP2GP system is being used by more than 3,500 of England's 9,000 GP practices. Those GPs are using either the EMIS LV or INPS Vision 3 software, which work with the GP2GP system.
NHS tech agency Connecting For Health (CfH) said the take-up of the GP2GP system since it was introduced last July has been fast, with two-thirds of surgeries with the necessary GP2GP-compliant technology now using it.
CfH initially said it expected to roll out the system to 90 per cent of all GP practices by the end of this year but now says the number of practices receiving GP2GP during that period will be subject to the speed with which other GP clinical systems join EMIS LV and INPS Vision 3 in the roll-out.
GP2GP software enables patients' records to be electronically transferred securely from one practice to another - replacing the laborious process of printing, posting and retyping during each manual transfer.
silicon.com Public Sector
Get the latest public sector news straight to your inbox. Sign up for the PS newsletter today!
There have been more than 80,000 records transferred using GP2GP and CfH said 4,000 surgeries will be running the system by the end of March.
A spokesman for CFH said: "At the moment we are exceeding our expectations of where we would be."
During the roll-out, practices have received training on GP2GP software, either from the suppliers or in a small number of Primary Care Trusts by local training staff.
Comments
There are 3 comments. Join the discussion
1. Richard
My GP types a lot in, but never seems to get anything useful out of the system.
The IT system seems not even to recall basic information such as my previous adverse reactions to particular medicines or my allergies.
There's no evidence that it helps monitor long-term health conditions - even the simple monitoring of blood-pressure.
So, as with so many government IT systems:
What's the point of this system and of collecting all this information?
Also, exactly how would my health benefit if this poor quality, inaccurate information were "shared" across the rest of the NHS IT system?
2. Simon
And all this without so much as a "by the way, we are going to ..." letter from my GP. And I suppose any idea of consultation of consent is just fanciful these days.
3. Chris Goodman
Far simpler, far cheaper, less equipment and systems to fail would be stand alone GPs practices. When a patient leaves to move to another GP, be it local or elsewhere, it would be far simpler for a disc to be popped into a writer and the patients details recorded and passed to the departing patient to hand to the new GP.
Should it get lost then only the patient would be to blame and would be expected to pay the cost of getting a replacement.
Just think of all that lovely expensive equipment and all those high paid techies that would NOT be needed to run a spine to link all the GPs - and all the funding that would release for medical services.