Third of GP practices adopt e-records system

More than a third of doctor's surgeries in England have now adopted an electronic health-records system as part of the £12.4bn NHS National Programme for IT.

The GP2GP system is being used by more than 3,500 of England's 9,000 GP practices. Those GPs are using either the Emis LV or INPS Vision 3 software, which work with the GP2GP system.

GP2GP software enables patients' records to be electronically transferred securely from one practice to another, replacing the laborious process of printing, posting and retyping during each manual transfer.

NHS technology agency Connecting For Health (CfH) said uptake of the GP2GP system since it was introduced last July has been fast, with two-thirds of surgeries with the necessary GP2GP-compliant technology now using it.

CfH initially said it expected to roll out the system to 90 percent of all GP practices by the end of this year but now says the number of practices receiving GP2GP during that period will be subject to the speed with which other GP clinical systems join Emis LV and INPS Vision 3 in the rollout.

There have been more than 80,000 records transferred using GP2GP and CfH said 4,000 surgeries will be running the system by the end of March.

A spokesman for CFH said: "At the moment, we are exceeding our expectations of where we would be".

During the rollout, practices have received training on GP2GP software, either from the suppliers or — in a small number of primary care trusts — by local training staff.