PCTs start transferring patient records by CD

Practices from two primary care trusts in Hertfordshire are about to start transferring patients records on CD, ahead of the arrival of the national GP2GP record transfer project.

St Albans & Harpenden and Hertsmere PCTs have set up a system that allows practices to send and receive CD-ROMs holding the entire patient record including attachments.

Roz Foad, IM&T service manager for the PCTs, said the initiative was developed to help local practices overcome the time and patient safety issues involving in the current paper-based transfer system of medical records.

She told EHI Primary Care: "When a patient moves a practice has to print out reams and reams of paper including the whole record plus all the attachments such as referrals letters, discharge summaries and consultant letters . Often these are kept as scanned images so each time they are printed out and rescanned it degrades the quality of the letter making them virtually unreadable."

The PCTs have developed a protocol for the transfer of records via CD plus specific system-specific instructions both for how to create the CD at one end and to open and use it at the other end. The instructions currently cover software from In Practice Systems and TPP with EMIS to be added imminently and the PCT hopes that iSoft will also take part shortly.

CDs will be sent via the same forwarding agencies used for paper-based records, and therefore subject to the same confidentiality rules, and a note will be attached to each CD so that practices who do not wish to receive notes in this way can contact the originating practice to resend the notes in the traditional format.

Foad said the scheme was open to all 22 practices covered by her PCTs and that practices from the two other PCTs in west Hertfordshire may also take part. The nGMS contract requires practices to receive consent from their PCT before sending records that are not paper-based but, once that has been done, any practice can take advantage of the initiative.

Dr Alan Ferris, a GP in Potters Bar, plans to start using the CDs in his practice this week and predicted it would save a lot of time for his staff. . He told EHI Primary Care: "I think this is long overdue. It seems a complete nonsense in this day and age to have to print out all the paperwork that been scanned in and end up making a copy of a copy. "

The project has been developed to fill the gap while Connecting for Health develops its electronic GP2GP project which is still in its early stages with only the second practice to go live starting to use the system a few weeks ago. EHI Primary Care understands that while it may be possible to transfer data between practices using the same GP software by the end of the year the task of transferring between different systems could take considerably longer.

Connecting for Health have also already shown interest in the Hertfordshire scheme and its potential to help practices using some of the smaller systems not currently covered by the GP2GP project.

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