Scottish practices make the case for new IT systems

Scottish GPs are exercising their new right to choose their own IT systems with an exodus from the dominant GPASS (GP Administration System for Scotland).

Over a quarter of GPASS’ 880 users have submitted business cases to abandon GPASS and obtain funding for new systems, according to Dr Stuart Scott, chair of the British Medical Association’s Scottish GPC IT sub-committee.

“I think practices have just lost patience,” said Dr Scott, who is GPs’chief IT negotiator and a conduit for their protests about GPASS’ shortcomings.

He said that practices had to go through quite a few hoops with their business cases, but some acceptances of those cases were coming through with Argyll and Clyde Health Board being the first the agree to fund the system switches.

GPs won the right to choose their own systems in April last year following protests about GPASS and a similar ruling about system choice for English GPs. Certain conditions have to be met including an agreement that the new system will use a central data server.

GPs have coped with a number of problems with GPASS and were promised a new improved version – GPASS Clinical. According to Dr Scott, only 21 practices have the new version so far.

A GPASS spokesperson commented: "21 GPASS practices, as well as seven branch surgeries, are now live within the Managed Service Environment. Further practices are scheduled for migration between now and mid-February. This roll out schedule is planned in conjunction with nominated pilot sites, at pace negotiated with health boards and practices."

Dr Scott said the latest GPASS problem which had been reported to him was with the CALM contract manager software that calculates performance under the Quality Outcomes Framework (QOF). A fault in the software has set to zero the column that records the reminder letters sent to patients needing reviews for chronic conditions such as high blood pressure or asthma.

After three letters, Dr Scott explained, practices could put the patient down as an ‘exception’. “They may have had two letters but practices don’t know that at the moment. They [GPASS] are producing a fix that will be out soon but how quickly that will be I don’t know. That’s upset quite a lot of practices.”

He added that January was a particularly bad time for the problem to occur with deadlines looming for the submission of 2005-6 QOF data.

GPASS confirmed to EHI Primary Care: "It has been identified that there is a problem with the ‘Letter No.’ column in CALM V21. When we moved into the month of January the ‘Letter No.’ column unfortunately changed to display zero letters sent for all patients.”

However the spokesperson said that the bug would be fixed by downloading CALM V23 where users would find the ‘Letter No’ column corrected.

Dr Scott said the speed of the switch to other systems would depend on the capacity of the system suppliers to move 250 practices. He predicted there could be more practices wanting to move if there were more incidents along the lines of the CALM problem.

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