What is GPES?

GPES is a centrally managed primary care data extraction service.

How will it work?

GPES will be capable of obtaining information from GP practices across England for specific and approved purposes whilst ensuring patient confidentiality and privacy. We are committed to protecting sensitive information and have established Information Governance Principles (pdf 234KB) that have been approved by the National Information Governance Board and also by the Medical Ethics Committees of the British Medical Association and the Royal College of GPs.

GPES will provide the centralised development and scheduling of extractions for its prospective customers and the service is being designed to minimise the workload on GP Practice resources for the extraction process itself.

Why is GPES being developed?

GP patient records are the most complete record of a patient's health within the NHS. They comprise a wealth of information about patient care, the prevalence of diseases and treatments given.

The systems that are currently used to access and analyse these data do not easily share information between them. GPES is designed to provide data extractions that are comparable across the NHS, enabling improvements to patient care, reductions in health inequalities and increased system efficiencies, by providing access to this information on a national scale for the first time.

GPES will be part of the new process to provide payments to GPs and Clinical Commissioning Groups. GPES will extract data from GP clinical systems in order to support payments to GPs, but GPES will not calculate those payments or make those payments. The new Calculating Quality Reporting Service will calculate the payments.

GPES is of vital strategic importance and plays an essential role in the NHS's future information needs.

Who is responsible for GPES?

The service is being developed and centrally managed on behalf of the NHS by The NHS Information Centre with the sponsorship and support of the Department of Health.

GPES will be delivered by a number of IT services organisations. ATOS have been awarded the contract to provide the query tool to extract data from GP practice systems, whilst the extractions themselves will be conducted by the GP practice system suppliers. EMIS are the first GP practice system supplier to sign a contract with the NHS IC to produce GPES extracts.

When will GPES be operational?

GPES is currently in development and its first major deliverable will be data for the Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF) from April 2013.