CQRS error hits GP QOF payments

A calculating error at the Calculating Quality Reporting Service has led to GPs missing out on thousands of pounds of Quality and Outcomes Framework points in the 2013-14 financial year.

The Health and Social Care Information Centre is now recalculating the payments. 

However, EHI has also learned that some practices will have to continue to enter and calculate QOF information manually, because the problems have affected the automatic extraction that should have been done by the GP Extraction Service.

The payments problem has arisen because of a calculating problems with the CQRS, a web based system calculating QOF payments. It used GP practice figures from January this year instead of January 2013 to calculate the money that surgeries were due.

An NHS England spokesperson said that the QOF extraction and payment processing had run “successfully” over the year end.

“However, the intended 2013-14 QOF payments initially notified to practices were incorrectly calculated by reference to average list size (the Contractor Population Index) in January 2014 rather than January 2013.”

The spokesperson added that: “The Health and Social Care Information Centre is now recalculating these payments to reflect the correct Contractor Population Index.

“[It] will inform practices of the recalculated payment. The correction will take effect once the practice and area team have agreed and approved the achievement.”

Pulse has reported that as a result of the errors GP managers who logged into the CQRS system had been hit by an apparent loss of several thousand pounds in some cases.

The GP magazine has also reported that the errors included the wrong list size being used to calculate the payments, which means practices were given the wrong estimates and all payments will have to be recalculated.

GPES, which was implemented last year, aims to take automatically extract data from GP practice systems, including QOF data. 

EHI reported in October last year that due to problems with the CQRS, GP practices had to manually enter the data for some of the payments.

GP practices were then told they did not need to manually enter data for QOF 2013-14, as CQRS and GPES would support this process.

However, a letter sent to its local area teams by NHS England says that some area teams will have to calculate their QOF achievements manually, because of the need for an adjustment.

“This letter advises of a necessary manual adjustment that area teams will need to make to calculate the correct payments due to PMS practices for 2013-14,” the letter, which was issued last week, says.

“The adjustment is needed to ensure the QOF PMS Points Deduction is made at the correct value. This is because the current calculation does not take account of April 2013 changes to the Statement of Financial Entitlements and in doing so it undervalues the cost of the deduction that needs to be made.”

The errors also mean that for some practices, the extraction of QOF data from GPES never happened.

The NHS England spokesperson apologised for “any concerns that this has caused for practices,” and added:

“We will also ensure that QOF aspiration payments for 2014-15 are adjusted accordingly.”