Regulation changes coming in this month could end the requirement to send on a physical record after a patient has moved surgeries, NHS England has said.
NHS England’s senior responsible officer for the digital transformation of general practice programme, Alan McDermott, has said that a recent upgrade of the GP2GP electronic record transfer system, which allows it to handle much larger files sizes and attachments, would be the end of the practise of sending Lloyd George envelopes around the country.
Speaking at the Best Practice conference in Birmingham earlier this week, he told delegates: ’There’s been a major new enhancement of that GP2GP system that went into operation earlier this year, across Emis and TPP, which allows, pretty much, the full record to transfer, and ought to allow us to entirely remove the need to transfer documentation manually between practices.
’The regulations around this are changing this month… to allow practices that are making full use of their GP2GP functionality, to not have to send patient records manually, hard copy when patients transfer between practices.’
Practices have had months of disruption to records movement after NHS England outsourced the contract to for primary care support services to Capita.
Pulse has revealed practices have been left with stockpiles of records and in some cases being reported to the Information Commissioner’s Office for not having a record which was lost in the system.
The root of the problem was a significant underestimation of the demand when NHS England tendered the contract, and the fact that Capita has not yet been able to launch its new national barcoding system for record transfers.
