In December 2001, the Department of Health introduced the External Gateway system to help control the amount of guidance, targets and planning requirements issued to the NHS from the Department.

The Departments Gateway team have confirmed that the guidance and best practice documents do not need to go through Gateway as they would class them as routine, technical/specialised work and project orientated.

As such, the guidance and best practice documents will be issued via the standard NHS Connecting for Health processes and locally as appropriate.

Documents common to various disciplines | Primary care | Secondary care | Child Health | RIS/PACS| Social Care

Documents common to various disciplines

The following documents are common in their relevance for primary care, secondary care, child health, community health, mental health, Radiology Information System records (RIS)/Picture Archiving and Communications System (PACS) and suppliers. Further documents specific to individual disciplines are listed later.

At the point of migration at least 95% of records of active patients and 100% of records for all non active patients must have an NHS number that has been traced and verified within six months of migration. No duplicate records should be migrated either by NHS number or by common demographics.

Data Migration

• Data Migration Guidance: Active Patients (PDF 96Kb) - October 2008. The purpose of this document is to assist and provide guidance to end-users and Local Service Providers (LSP) in identifying which patients, as a minimum, should be migrated from the existing patient administration systems (PAS) to those offered by the LSP.

Cleansing

• Migration Analysis Cleansing Service (MACS) Customer Information v8 (PDF 168Kb) NHS Central Register - March 2008. This document details the engagement process and file formats required.
• Guidance to Support Duplicate Record Management on Legacy Patient Administration Systems During Data Cleansing Prior to NHS Connecting for Health Data Migrations (PDF 190Kb) - June 2010 . Guidance to NHS acute trusts to assist in the identification and resolution of existing duplicate records, whilst preventing new duplicates from occurring prior to data migration to new systems
• Guidance on the Use of Default Dates of Birth (PDF 207Kb) - June 2010
• Guidance on Ethnic Naming Conventions (PDF 283Kb) - March 2009.  This guidance has been developed as early migrations have highlighted that a number of issues associated with the data capture and management of some ethnic names have proved to be difficult.
  
• SCG Guidance: How to convert Diacritic Characters within Patient Names (PDF 450Kb) on the Standards Consultancy Group Publications. The scope of this document will focus on diacritic characters that exist in names from all official European Union (EU) writing scripts and at minimum all modern diacritic characters used in the alphabets of the 23 official EU languages.

Migrating

• IQAP Standard for Migrating Patient Administration System Data (PDF 107Kb) - July 2006 . This document should be followed by migrating NHS organisations, in collaboration with Local Service Providers (LSPs), when migrating Patient Administration Systems (PAS).
  
• IQAP Standard for Migrating Addresses with Effective Dates (PDF 63Kb) - October 2005. An automatic method of identifying what is the most recent address when merging these patient details for the same address type on an instance level.
• Merging Trust Master Patient Indexes in Shared Instances - LSP Requirements (PDF 102Kb) - November 2005. The purpose of this document is to define the set of rules by which LSPs may safely identify and merge demographic records from different organisations when the records are for the same person. It is also intended to define the process to determine what data should be used to populate the patient record should there be a discrepancy between the data items identified for merge.

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Primary care

• IQAP Data Cleansing Guidance for GP System Migration (PDF 384Kb) - December 2010. Guidance on the elements of data cleansing that GP practices should undertake in preparation for system migration. This document is a pre-requisite for generating a data baseline.

• IQAP Data Baseline Guidance for GP System Migration (PDF 206Kb) - December 2010. Guidance on the necessary action to be undertaken prior to GP system migration to establish a data baseline against which the effectiveness of data conversion can be measured.
• See also GPSoC Data Migration considerations - in regard to continued access of legacy data.
• GPSoC Data Migration Specification (PDF 119Kb) Specification to set out a description of the Data Migration Services in relation to GP clinical IT systems and the associated requirements, roles and responsibilities required to support the migration of GP clinical IT system data.

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Secondary care

• Pre Live Patient Demographic Data Cleansing - Guidance for Secondary Care (PDF 258Kb) -  August 2005. Guidance for secondary care trusts who are cleansing data prior to going live with the NHS Care Records Service.

 Also see the 'documents common to various disciplines' Back to the top

Child Health

• Data Migration Guidance: Definition of Active Patients for Child Health (PDF 93Kb) - October 2008. Guidance for trusts for defining an Active Patient within Child Health.

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RIS/PACS

Data migration

• Data Migration Guidance: (Active Patients) RIS/PACS (PDF 72Kb). This guidance has been developed to assist and provide guidance to Trusts and LSPs to identify which patients (as a minimum) should be migrated from an existing system to the reference solution provided by the LSP. It is aimed specifically at those organisations that plan to migrate their Radiology Information System records (RIS) and/or Picture Archiving and Communications System (PACS) images.
• IQAP Statement on the use of NHS Number for the identification of Patient data within RIS/PACS LSP Solutions (PDF 74Kb). The NHS number must be directly referenced and available for look-up in all active data sets stored or maintained within Spine connected RIS/PACS solutions provided by the LSP.
• IQAP Guidance for the Identification of Patient Records and Images within Interim RIS/PACS Solutions (PDF 52Kb). The purpose of this document is to give guidance to NHS Acute Trusts to assist in the unique identification of records and associated images, during the period when the availability of NHS numbers for every patient encountered may not be possible. The method outlined in the document may also assist in the prevention of any new duplicates being established on existing RIS or associated PACS systems prior to the availability of the strategic RIS/PACS solution.

Cleansing

• Guidance to Support Duplicate Record Management on Existing RIS and PACS Systems during Data Cleansing Procedures (PDF 96Kb). This guidance has been developed to support NHS trusts to identify and resolve any existing duplicate records on current Radiology Information Systems (RIS). All known duplicates on existing systems should be resolved and removed as an integral part of data cleansing processes. Data cleansing should always be conducted prior to migration into LSP RIS/PACS solutions. The processes outlined should help to prevent new duplicates being established on any existing RIS or associated PAS prior to migration.

Also see the 'documents common to various disciplines' Back to the top 

Social Care

• Social Care Data Quality Requirements for Interfacing to PDS (PDF 36Kb) - June 2009 This paper sets out interface data quality requirements for Social Care PDS Early Adopters and Common Assessment Framework (CAF) for adults demonstrator projects.

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