GPs get £1 a patient incentive to use NHS IT

The government is offering GPs a cash incentive of almost £1 per patient in an attempt to boost use of the electronic Choose and Book outpatient referral system.

The Choose and Book system is part of the £6.2bn Connecting for Health (CfH) project to overhaul and modernise NHS IT systems - and it has had its critics.

The incentive has been introduced as part of revisions to GP general medical service contracts from 1 April 2006, and means doctors can claim 96p per registered patient they refer to a consultant through Choose and Book.

The changes come after the failure of the previous incentive scheme, under which every single one of the 303 Primary Care Trusts in England failed to claim a £100,000 bonus they were entitled to if half of their GP referrals for outpatient appointments were done electronically through Choose and Book by October last year.

Health minister Ivan Lewis said there is now a total incentive pot of just over £50m available this year - although that is based on all 53.3 million registered GP patients in England having referrals booked through the Choose and Book system.

Lewis told MPs this week that the incentives are being funded "as a relatively small part of the growth in overall resource allocations to primary care trusts".

The Choose and Book system allows GPs to electronically book a hospital referral appointment on the spot with the patient, rather than waiting weeks using the old paper-based method.

It has been subject to long delays, however, and came into service a year later than originally promised, while half of GPs in a recent survey ranked the Choose and Book system as 'poor' or 'fairly poor'.

But NHS CfH claims momentum is continuing to build behind Choose and Book with an average of 4,000 bookings per day being made through the system as of the end of March 2006, although that is still a small percentage of the 9.5 million NHS outpatient appointments booked each year.

In an interview with silicon.com last month, NHS IT director general Richard Granger hit back at critics of the CfH programme and described it as a "work in progress".

He said: "People who think the NHS is homogeneous are ill-informed. Every institution has things about it which are unique. It's not a simple job. We just keep plugging away and every day in several places things go live."

Granger is expected to come under further pressure this week when parliamentary spending watchdog the National Audit Office finally publishes its report on the NHS IT programme.