QOF Plus Year 1 - Imperial College London

Communication with the PCT’s health informatics teamFollowing development of new QOF+ indicators, the QOF+ Development Group worked with thePCT’s Health Informatics Team to help identify existing read codes for indicators and to provideclinician input into the development of appropriate templates on EMIS and VISION to facilitateQOF+, and to provide assistance with the development of the Business Rules for the QOF+ NewIndicators. The group also liaised with EMIS and VISION technical advisors to help inform theprocess. Templates were developed and piloted in 2 local practices, with input from practicestaff. Minor changes were made to the wording of some of the indicators following discussionswith the Health Informatics Team. It is anticipated that IT support within QOF+ will lead toimproved practice profiling, equity assessment using patient level data, timely progress reports topractices, and will inform who to target with a broader quality improvement support package.As the QMAS does not enable collection of data for QOF+, practices will be required to sign up tothe Apollo system to participate in the scheme. This will mean that anonymised medical recordsof all registered patients will be stored centrally by the PCT to enable analysis of performance andpermit monthly feedback of performance to practices. Resources will be put in place for the dataanalysis and to feedback performance data to practices by the team that will evaluate thescheme. In addition IT developments will also be put in place – this might include thedevelopment of a web-based reporting tool that practices can use to examine their ownperformance data and compare their practices against the other practices in the PCT.138