PCTs to offer local incentive schemes for data accreditation

PCTs will need to offer local incentive schemes for data accreditation from April to support the national roll-out of the Summary Care Record, NHS Connecting for Health has said.

The nationally negotiated directed enhanced service for IM&T finishes at the end of March and so far only 19% of GP practices have achieved component two which covers data accreditation although CfH said it expected that figure to “rise significantly” before the end of March as many practices are being accredited this month.

Dr Gillian Braunold, clinical director for the SCR, told EHI Primary Care that, following the end of the DES, PCTs would need to set up a local enhanced service (LES) scheme or other local payment system so practices could continue to get their data accredited ahead of the roll-out of the SCR

She added: “We are talking to colleagues in the Department of Health to try and find a home in the GP contract for national standards for data quality and information governance so that data which is fit for sharing is recognised as a national standard.”

She said the mechanism for achieving this would depend on negotiations between the BMA’s General Practitioner Committee (GPC) and the DH’s Primary Care Contracting division as part of their review of the GP contract and core and non-core work. However this would only happen in time for 2010, she said.

In the mean time the GPC has asked local medical committees to provide it with information about whether practices have tried to complete component two and not been paid by their PCT or wanted to complete component two but been informed by their PCT that there was no money available.

Dr Braunold told EHI Primary Care that she was not aware of any funding problems and said data accreditation would continue to be a precondition before a practice could upload its data to the spine. She said some PCTs had already set up a LES for data accreditation to cater for practices that had missed the deadline for signing up to the DES.

Latest figures from CfH show that 70% of GP practices had registered for the DES and 60% have achieved component one, requiring practices to complete a practice plan outlining how they would prepare for the National Programme for IT.

Dr Braunold said component three, which requires practices to maintain and regularly validate patients’ addresses and use release one of the Electronic Prescription Service, had been left to PCTs discretion. Component four, paid for using a system hosted to CfH standards, has caused difficulties because only one system, Vision 3 from INPS, is so far accredited.

Dr Braunold said CfH was looking at how it could help practices who had migrated to other hosted systems which had yet to achieve CfH accreditation.