1The GPES project
1.On the basis of a report by the Comptroller and Auditor General, we took evidence from the Department for Health (the Department), the Health and Social Care Information Centre and Atos UK and Ireland on the General Practice Extraction Service (GPES).1
2.GPES is an IT system designed to allow NHS organisations to extract data from all GP practice computer systems in England. The data extracted would be used to monitor quality, plan and pay for health services and help medical research. Work on the GPES project began in 2007 when it was the responsibility of the NHS Information Centre (NHS IC), which designed and ran the project. It was overseen by the Department which approved the business cases, the required funding, and also contributed technical expertise around the design and how it would integrate with other NHS systems.
3.GPES is designed to extract data from the four major clinical IT systems used by the 8,000 GP practices in England. NHS IC contracted with the four major suppliers of the clinical IT systems used by GPs to produce software to extract data from their systems. They also awarded a contract to Atos in December 2011 to produce the central software required to interact with each of these systems. On 31 March 2013 NHS IC closed and responsibility for GPES transferred to the new Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC).2
4.The original business case expected the service to start in 2009–10, but it took until April 2014 for HSCIC to provide the first GPES data extract to an NHS organisation. The HSCIC told us that the system was now providing data to two (Public Health England and NHS England) of the eight organisations identified as planned users of the service.3 The expected cost of the project increased from £14 million to £40 million during the planning and procurement stage. Further cost increases have been smaller, but there have been at least £5.5 million of write offs, additional settlements and delay costs.4
5.The HSCIC told us that the system was currently delivering half of what was originally asked.5 The Department believed that this would rise to some 60% of the contracted specification next year, but accepted that when compared to the full cost that had been paid this was “not value for money.”6 The Department noted that there were things that could be done to make GPES work better including reducing query times and increasing extraction volumes. The Department told us it needed an IT system to collect data from GPs to underpin the primary care payments and performance systems and that existing commercial systems do not provide the scale of data required, although they may be able to do so in the future. HSCIC is currently considering options to improve or replace GPES which will be considered by the department early next year.
1 C&AG’s Report, General Practice Extraction Service - Investigation, Session 2015-16, HC 265, 2 July 2015
2 C&AG’s Report, para 1.10, Figure 2
3 Q 74 and C&AG’s Report Figure 5
4 C&AG’s Report, para 3.4, Figure 4
© Parliamentary copyright 2015
Prepared 21 December 2015