Data accreditation completed for 800 practices

Just over 800 GP practices have now had their data accredited as part of the directed enhanced service for IM&T.

Data accreditation in preparation for uploading summary records to the spine is one of four elements in the DES which was extended for 12 months to March 2009 as part of this year’s GP contract settlement.

PRIMIS+, the data quality organisation that provides training for the DES, said the number of GP practices achieving data accreidtation was increasing rapidly. Figures more than doubled between the beginning of April and the end of May with the number of practices reaching the DES standards for data accreditation rising from 344 to 804.

Figures from PRIMIS+ show that at the end of May 4,992 practices from 145 PCTs had uploaded data to CHART Online, the organisation’s software tool which enables practices to mark their progress on data quality, and 2668 practices had uploaded data to Chart Online at least twice.

In April PRIMIS+ said that some PCTs had only just identified their approach to the DES and were having difficulty recruiting assessors. Latest figures from the end of May show that 508 assessors have received IM&T DES training, up from 466 at the beginning of April, and 114 out of 150 PCTs have trained assessors.

The data accreditation element of the DES is worth 44p per patient to practices and is a three stages process involving a practice submission, quantitative analysis of data taken from the practice and a visit from an assessor to provide necessary qualitative analysis.

The other three elements of the DES cover agreement of a plan for practice participation in the National Programme for IT, participation in the Electronic Prescription Service project and migration to a Connecting for Health accredited server. Only INPS’s Vision 3 system as supplied by BT in London is so far accredited to CfH standards.

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