GPASS users doubt future use in national records

Ministerial claims that the troubled GP system GPASS will be central to the development of the national electronic single record in Scotland have been dismissed by the system’s own user group.

Andy Kerr, Scottish health minister, told GP newspaper Pulse last week that GPASS would be "an incredibly important part of IT developments in Scotland and be central to the development of a national electronic record.”

However Dr Andrew McElhinney, GPASS User Group chairman, said the group met last week and were extremely doubtful that GPASS would be capable of performing such a role.

Dr McElhinney told EHI Primary Care: "The user group doesn’t feel that GPASS is good enough to be seen as a building block for the single patient record. We feel it’s OK for basic tasks but it’s not fit for paperlight work and it’s not viable for a single patient record."

Hopes for the future of the GPASS system have been pinned on its new software, GPASS Clinical. However only 23 practices have so far been installed with the software, running on a managed server, with another three or four practices running GPASS Clinical on local servers.

Dr McElhinney said the rollout, which the user group had originally hoped would cover 90% of the 800 GPASS practices by June this year, had now been halted while problems with the managed server, including issues about the lack of a back-up server, speed of the system and printing problems, were addressed.

He said the issue of using central servers was also holding back progress on the movement of 200 GPASS practices which have expressed an interest in moving from GPASS as part of a system choice initiative launched last year.

Dr McElhinney added: "It’s very frustrating that GPASS have had this new version of their software for over a year and yet only 26 or 27 practices have had it installed so far. There’s a big gap between the reality and what GPASS needs to be to form a significant part of the electronic patient record."