John Hampson

Bury Primary Care Trust has been an early pioneer of GP2GP – and no one has been more enthusiastic than local GP and Professional Executive Committee lead for IM&T Dr John Hampson.

Dr Hampson is based at Greenmount Medical Centre in the north west of Bury. He says: "GP2GP is good news for practices. It takes an electronic medical record and transfers it directly to another practice. The record is reproduced completely at the other end. In fact, the record looks virtually identical to how it would have appeared on the previous practice's system."

The GP adds that the record transfer process is almost instantaneous. "The medical record comes across as soon as the other practice sends it across. It's been great to have a new patient register in the morning, come in for a consultation in the afternoon and have the record already here, ready and waiting.

"The GP2GP transfer process is pretty much invisible to me as a GP because it's our administrative staff who deal with it. But I benefit in a big way from GP2GP. I hardly ever refer to paper records these days – it's the electronic record that I work off and to have it available immediately is a massive help. Paper records have taken many weeks to be transferred between practices.

"The level of historic detail in the imported records is particularly useful. Practices in Bury were amongst the earliest to computerise and we have received GP2GP transfers including detailed prescribing records from almost 20 years ago, as well as detailed pathology reports from over 10 years ago. Attachments including scanned images are included too.

"We are now able to easily create graphs showing trends in previous test results, which are invaluable in the management of chronic diseases such as diabetes. It is also very useful to be able to easily see which medications have been tried and perhaps stopped by previous clinicians.

"It's important that practices focus on good housekeeping of their records and I was a little worried about the issue of 'data contamination' before we got GP2GP. But from what I've seen, the quality of incoming records has been very good."

For clinical safety reasons GPs still need to authorise repeat medications and confirm patients' allergies under GP2GP. "But that's not a problem," says John. "That's what we have to do anyway when we get a new patient."

Implementing GP2GP

GP2GP is currently being rolled-out to practices which have INPS or EMIS clinical systems (more suppliers will join the roll-out in the future). Bury's 33 practices are equipped with INPS Vision.

John, a champion of new technology within the PCT, was closely involved in the implementation locally. He says: "You can obviously implement GP2GP in different ways but in Bury we went for a 'big bang', with all practices across the PCT being enabled by INPS in the same week.

"The good thing about this was that right from the start we had a critical mass of practices using the functionality. And, as a large proportion of patient transfers happen locally, we immediately had large numbers of records going backwards and forwards between local practices. People got used to the process, saw the benefits and gained confidence in GP2GP immediately."

Greenmount Medical Centre

Angela Quarmby is data manager at the Greenmount practice but also has a PCT-wide role when it comes to coaching users on new technology. She says: "Practices have been fine with GP2GP. It's something new for administrative staff to learn but the process is quite simple to deal with, both when they request the record and as it comes in.

"In Bury we benefit from having our own dedicated team of Vision trainers, who work out of the practices. We have worked closely with INPS, who have been operating a dedicated helpline for GP2GP, but most of the queries that have come up have not been too difficult to solve and we've been able to deal with them locally."

Looking to the future

As for John, he is now eagerly looking forward to when practices upgrade from version 1.0 of GP2GP to version 1.1.

This is being trialled in Croydon PCT and, once it has been put through its paces, will herald the start of 'inter-operable' transfers. In other words, version 1.1 will allow records to be transferred between INPS and EMIS systems, and vice versa.

"It will be interesting to see what an incoming record from an EMIS system will look like," he says. "But it's certainly easier for a practice to edit and summarise a record on screen, rather than starting with a blank one and having to populate it from a paper record. There are major time savings involved."

John's also looking forward to more and more practices becoming GP2GP-enabled in the coming months, both regionally and nationally. "The benefits will be felt more and more," he says. "We get a lot of transfers from other PCTs so when practices there are live with GP2GP too things will be even better."

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