Patient records being moved via the GP2GP transfer process will soon include restrictions put in place by GPs at the previous practice.
In its most recent primary care newsletter, NHS England confirmed that a ‘new solution’ had been developed to allow this function which is expected to start by the autumn.
NHSE said this will ‘allow the receiving practice to identify and review any restrictions which prevent patients from accessing all or part of their own record via the NHS App or online account’.
The system suppliers as well as practice representatives have been consulted on the solution, which NHSE has said should ‘help the process as part of accelerating citizen access to GP records’.
Before this new solution was developed, when patients registered at a new practice they could automatically access prospective information.
The new practice would therefore have to manually update the records access settings with relevant redactions, repeating the work already done by the previous practice.
GPs are required to use the GP2GP transfer process under the GMS contract, and NHSE has said it supports the health secretary’s objective that ‘patients should have digital records that follow them around’ the system.
As part of this year’s imposed contract, all GP practices need to offer automatic access to prospective patient records via the NHS App by 31 October.
The BMA’s GP committee had been preparing a legal challenge to delay this target date, however last month it abandoned these plans due to lack of resourcing and legal strength.
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 delay this following concerns about patient data safeguarding. It has since been pursuing a phased rollout of the records access programme.
