GP practices have been told they will have to submit flu immunisations data manually for the rest of the year in order to get paid, after NHS chiefs decided to abandon attempts at automated collections.
Following a ‘range of technical issues’, the Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC) said it had been advised by NHS England not to carry out any further automated collections of seasonal flu vaccination data from any practice for ‘the remainder of this financial year’.
In addition, practices using EMIS and TPP IT systems will need to enter their pneumococcal vaccination data manually, while EMIS practices will have to do this for both routine and catch-up shingles immunisation data.
The move comes after many practices were made to review and submit flu and pneumococcal data manually over Christmas, because of missing data and payment miscalculations by the CQRS.
The HSCIC said in a statement to Pulse that the the problems ’have largely been the result of a number of different issues with different GP suppliers’ and that ’while many of these problems have since been fixed, we want to fully investigate the situation before we re-run a collection’.
The statement added: ’We have asked practices to manually enter data until the end of March 2016, to reduce impact on users and to give us time to work through the issues. This also ensures that users can be confident that their data has been entered and that payments can be calculated.
’This decision was taken in conjunction with user representatives and NHS England. We recognise and apologise for the inconvenience this may cause.’
The GPC said the situation was ‘unacceptable’ and NHS managers needed to ‘get a grip’ of the data collection processes.
Dr Richard Vautrey, deputy chair of the GPC, said: ‘NHS England and the HSCIC really do need to get a grip on this situation as the repeated failure of the CQRS is completely unacceptable and is adding yet more unnecessary workload on to hard pressed practices.’
