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Story URL: http://www.silicon.com/publicsector/0,3800010403,39170198,00.htm

GP patient record system hits latest target
But two-thirds of surgeries not yet connected...

By Nick Heath

Published: Wednesday 27 February 2008

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.

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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.