The pharmacy owners will have to use an NHS approved clinical IT system to make their clinical records and payment claims for the Hypertension case-finding service from 1st September 2023, announced NHS England.
HxConsult (Positive Solutions); Pharmacy Manager (Cegedim); PharmOutcomes (Pinnacle Health); and Sonar health (Sonar informatics) are expected to develop their systems to include functionality to support the service, but over time, it is hoped other suppliers will add the service to their systems.
Pharmacy owners providing the service will need to consider which system they want to use and will then need to enter into a contract with that supplier.
All service provisions within June, July and August 2023 should be claimed by the current manual MYS process by Tuesday 5th September. Claims at a later date will only be possible via one of the approved IT systems.
The Community Pharmacy England said: "When the Hypertension case-finding service was first launched in October 2021, the ambition was to develop IT systems that would support provision of the service.
"These IT systems will allow pharmacy teams to make a clinical record for the service and the data in the record will then be used by the IT system to populate a claim for payment within the NHSBSA’s Manage Your Service (MYS) platform.
This means pharmacy owners will not need to manually transcribe data from their records into MYS, as is currently the case. The new approach mirrors what already happens for the Community Pharmacist Consultation Service and the Flu vaccination service."
The transfer of data to the MYS platform will be via an API (Application Programming Interface) to automate payment claims and reporting of the data to the NHSBSA.
It added: "The IT systems, including the APIs, must meet minimum requirements specified within NHS IT technical toolkits. In previous negotiations with the Department of Health and Social Care and NHS England, it was agreed that once such IT systems are available, pharmacy owners must use one of these systems by an agreed deadline (in this case, 1st September 2023).
All payment claims for the service from 1st September will need to be made via the API and there will be no manual option to claim for service provisions.
The transfer of data via the API will happen throughout the month, as data is entered into the IT systems. The service provisions will then be available to view in MYS from the 1st of the following month. For example, service provisions in September will be available to view in MYS on 1st October. Contractors will then need to log into the MYS platform to check that the data matches the details in their IT system, and they will then need to submit their claim for payment."
The NHSBSA have also recently engaged with IT supplier market on the development of an API to support the Discharge Medicines Service. As this is an Essential service that pharmacy contractors must provide, they have undertaken additional engagement with the wider IT system supplier market and they will confirm timescales for the implementation in due course.
Sukhi Basra
