GPES COVID-19 At Risk Patients data collection version 5
A revised Data Provision Notice (DPN) has now been issued for this continuing data collection.
The objective of this collection is on an ongoing basis to identify patients registered at General Practices who may be more at risk of getting seriously ill with COVID-19 and who would be potentially eligible for treatment should they contract COVID-19. The data collected will be analysed and linked with other data NHS Digital holds to identify a list of potentially eligible patients.
Treatment options are available for some people who have tested positive for coronavirus (COVID-19). NHS Digital is providing the technology to support the NHS to identify patients eligible for the drugs.
This General Practice Extraction Service (GPES) data will be extracted weekly and will feed a variety of COVID-19 related cohorting programmes including COVID-19 therapeutics and vaccination programmes and will continue as long as the rationale continues for the collection of data.
The data, as specified by the DPN, supports the COVID-19 Public Health Directions 2020 from the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care. Organisations that are in scope of the notice are legally required to comply.
General Practices will be automatically enrolled into the data extract and will not be required to participate. This will reduce burden on GP’s as there will be no offer of participation on Calculating Quality Reporting Service (CQRS).
As NHS Digital is collecting personal data from General Practices through this collection, General Practices have a legal duty to be transparent and to provide patients with transparency information under UK GDPR about the data they are sharing with NHS Digital.
Therefore, General Practices need to update their own Transparency Notices on their websites to include details of this collection. NHS Digital has produced a COVID-19 response transparency notice which GPs can use to do this.
About GPES COVID-19 At Risk Patients data collection version 5
The General Practice Extraction Service (GPES) will require the data on a weekly basis until further notice and a decision is made to end the extract.
The GPES COVID-19 At Risk Patients data collection has been completely revised. This is in line with the identification of cohorts to align with the McInnes report changes: Defining the highest-risk clinical subgroups upon community infection with SARS-CoV-2 when considering the use of neutralising monoclonal antibodies (nMABs) and antiviral drugs: independent advisory group report – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk).
The revised data collection will feed a variety of COVID-19 related cohorting programmes including COVID-19 therapeutics and vaccination programmes and will continue as long as the rationale continues for the collection of data. These are outlined in Appendix A – Specification in the DPN.
The GPES data extraction will identify all patients currently registered with a General Practice who fall under the cohort count and code clusters specified in the business rules. These are outlined in Appendix A – Specification in the DPN.
For each patient above, NHS Digital will require the following personal data, as well as the General Practice that individuals are registered with:
- NHS Number
- surname and forename
- date of birth
- date of death
- address and postcode
- ethnicity
- age
- sex
Where a patient’s record contains a defined long-term medical condition, such as Downs syndrome, cancers, haematological disease, renal disease, liver disease, immunosuppression, transplants and neurological disease which poses a COVID-19 risk and/or a condition/code which identifies a patient as being at risk of complications from flu/COVID-19, data will be extracted for:
- the associated SNOMED CT code(s) and date(s) for the:
- medical condition
- recorded activity for COVID-19 in the patient’s medical record
- drug treatment(s)
- any values such as scores or prescriptions associated with the SNOMED CT code(s)
There is a dedicated section about Data Provision Notices and Directions on our website.
You are receiving this communication because you are listed as the main contact by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) for Primary Medical Services. If you need to amend these details, please contact the CQC directly.