There are only three more available dates on which EMIS will enable patient access to records on behalf of practices, NHS England has warned.
As part of the updated GP contract, NHSE told GP practices in March that they will need to offer automatic access to prospective patient records via the NHS app by 31 October 2023.
In its latest primary care bulletin, NHSE urged EMIS practices to complete an ‘opt-in form’ in order to have records access enabled automatically before the deadline.
On this form, practices can select one of three more available dates for EMIS to update access rights on their behalf.
NHSE said: ‘If EMIS practices do not take advantage of these enablement dates, then they will have to enable patient access manually.’
Patients were initially set to be given automatic access to their prospective patient records via the NHS App from 1 November last year – starting with EMIS and TPP.
But NHSE was forced to abandon its plans following concerns about patient data safeguarding. It has since been pursuing a phased rollout of the records access programme.
In its March contract letter, the national commissioner said there were 1,400 practices offering access at the time, covering 6.5 million patients.
And a London ICB then expressly advised GP practices not to switch on automatic patient access ahead of the 31 October deadline, instead advising they switch it on only for patients who specifically request access.
Meanwhile, a Government review published earlier this year recommended that patients have greater access to their NHS record, including checking their position on waiting lists and removing themselves.
GPs have reported various issues with EMIS software recently, with an ‘embarrassing’ failure last week that meant practices in North East London were unable to print off pathology forms for hours, and a ‘catastrophic’ outage at the end of May that left practices all over the country unable to provide care for hours.
Pulse’s recent analysis of frequent IT faults in general practice looked at the effects on patient safety and GP workload.
So, threats again it is then, from NHSE?
Is ‘constructive dismissal’ an option when the employer is bullying the workers?
Looks like then want even more GPs to leave Partnerships, but are LHB/CCGs that keen to take on Directly Managed Practices, or are they just going to privatise the lot?
And what do patients think of all this, or do they only to get to choose at the next Election? – after it has become a fait accompli?
The IT is still chaotic in my view.
Still no proper redaction of notes (that means blanking out certain words, not just online, but for SARs)
The functions in EMIS don’t reliably work.
Still no functionality to prevent data breach in the event of “wrong patient filing” which will happen at least 1/1000 times. A timescale before online visibility to allow these to be corrected might help.
Docman still not sorted out “provisional” filing issue making most of the functionality not work
Docman 10 -only the filing clerk can set online visibility (whereas should be clinician reviewing). Can’t easily be undone. Redaction done after this point not visible online anyway so doesn’t work.
Inadequate security to prevent coercive online accounts setup without owner knowing they have one.
All of this leaves the GP partners as data controllers very vulnerable, and with little faith as to why this is being pushed through
“If a practice (EMIS) does not opt-in to have the script run before 31st October23 (last script available is early October23), then the practice will need to individually turn on prospective access to all patients in order to meet the contractual requirements of offering new health information to all patients (unless they have individually decided to opt-out or any exceptions apply)
If the script is not run, then yes, a practice will require to switch on individual patients manually.”
says NHSE