The General Practice Extraction Service (GPES or GP Extraction Service) was a British health service

outcomes research Outcomes research is a branch of public health research which studies the end results ( outcomes) of the structure and processes of the health care system on the health and well-being of patients and populations. According to one medical outcomes an ...

computer database that collates

statistical Statistics (from German: ''Statistik'', "description of a state, a country") is the discipline that concerns the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of data. In applying statistics to a scientific, industria ...

aggregated data (demographic

cohorts Cohort or cohortes may refer to: * Cohort (educational group), a group of students working together through the same academic curriculum * Cohort (floating point), a set of different encodings of the same numerical value * Cohort (military unit), ...

) from individual

medical record The terms medical record, health record and medical chart are used somewhat interchangeably to describe the systematic documentation of a single patient's medical history and care across time within one particular health care provider's jurisdic ...

s of GPs in

England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...

, for purposes independent of an individual's immediate health, such as

public health Public health is "the science and art of preventing disease, prolonging life and promoting health through the organized efforts and informed choices of society, organizations, public and private, communities and individuals". Analyzing the det ...

research. It may conflict with sensitive medical

confidentiality Confidentiality involves a set of rules or a promise usually executed through confidentiality agreements that limits the access or places restrictions on certain types of information. Legal confidentiality By law, lawyers are often required ...

. It is similar to

bioinformatics Bioinformatics () is an interdisciplinary field that develops methods and software tools for understanding biological data, in particular when the data sets are large and complex. As an interdisciplinary field of science, bioinformatics combi ...

epidemiology Epidemiology is the study and analysis of the distribution (who, when, and where), patterns and determinants of health and disease conditions in a defined population. It is a cornerstone of public health, and shapes policy decisions and evidenc ...

, and a

health information exchange Health information exchange (HIE) is the mobilization of health care information electronically across organizations within a region, community or hospital system. Participants in data exchange are called in the aggregate Health Information Netw ...

History

With advances in computing technology and databases, many more types of

public health research In public relations and communication science, publics are groups of individual people, and the public (a.k.a. the general public) is the totality of such groupings. This is a different concept to the sociology, sociological concept of the ''Öf ...

, including time-consuming

cohort studies A cohort study is a particular form of longitudinal study that samples a cohort (a group of people who share a defining characteristic, typically those who experienced a common event in a selected period, such as birth or graduation), performing ...

, are now possible; sifting through health data is quicker.

Medical conditions A disease is a particular abnormal condition that negatively affects the structure or function (biology), function of all or part of an organism, and that is not immediately due to any external injury. Diseases are often known to be medica ...

can be cross-referenced with lifestyle. The GPES began in 2007. The NHS has not had a good record for computer systems. The NHS National Programme for IT, a complete digital overhaul of the NHS's medical records, became

NHS Connecting for Health The NHS Connecting for Health (CFH) agency was part of the UK Department of Health and was formed on 1 April 2005, having replaced the former NHS Information Authority. It was part of the Department of Health Informatics Directorate, with the role ...

, and then partly by the Health and Social Care Information Centre; a lot of money was effectively lost on NHS Connecting for Health, sometimes quoted at £12 billion. GPES was meant to cost £14m but has cost £40m. The system was discussed by the

Public Accounts Committee (United Kingdom) The Committee of Public Accounts is a select committee of the British House of Commons. It is responsible for overseeing government expenditures, and to ensure they are effective and honest. The committee is seen as a crucial mechanism for e ...

(PAC) in 2015, who said the system has begun five years later than planned, being planned to start in 2009. During its usage period, the system supported national extracts for NHS England and Public Health England, that not only enabled payment for General Practices. But added to data sets around such areas as Learning Disabilities Observatory. By 2018, the GPET-Q engine was already seen as unfit for use and was beginning to be deprecated, favoring a much simpler system built in house at

NHS Digital NHS Digital is the trading name of the Health and Social Care Information Centre, which is the national provider of information, data and IT systems for commissioners, analysts and clinicians in health and social care in England, particularly th ...

. Numerous fails of standard

Disaster Recovery Disaster recovery is the process of maintaining or reestablishing vital infrastructure and systems following a natural or human-induced disaster, such as a storm or battle.It employs policies, tools, and procedures. Disaster recovery focuses on t ...

tests, showed that GPET-Q was becoming further unstable. By 2020, GPET-Q had been entirely retired, yet NHS Digital continue to receive requests for data extracts that are fulfilled by NHS Digital. The

General Practice Data for Planning and Research The General Practice Data for Planning and Research system was set up by the British National Health Service as a replacement for the General Practice Extraction Service as a means of transmitting data intended for use beyond that of providing indi ...

initiative, announced in May 2021, is intended to replace it.

Function

The purpose of the GPES is not dissimilar to the

Office for National Statistics The Office for National Statistics (ONS; cy, Swyddfa Ystadegau Gwladol) is the executive office of the UK Statistics Authority, a non-ministerial department which reports directly to the UK Parliament. Overview The ONS is responsible for th ...

in how it collates data. It consists of the query tool GPET-Q, and the extraction tool GPET-E.Reference guide
/ref> GPET-Q is designed by Paris-based

Atos Atos is a European multinational information technology (IT) service and consulting company headquartered in Bezons, France and offices worldwide. It specialises in hi-tech transactional services, unified communications, cloud, big data and ...

, a large

IT services Information technology service management (ITSM) is the activities that are performed by an organization to design, build, deliver, operate and control information technology (IT) services offered to customers. Differing from more technology-or ...

company. The data extracted from the GPES database will help medical research in the United Kingdom, and possible disease prevention at an individual level and at the public level - such as health campaigns. It will find where diseases are prevalent, and in which age groups and geographic areas, and possibly which social class.

Social class A social class is a grouping of people into a set of Dominance hierarchy, hierarchical social categories, the most common being the Upper class, upper, Middle class, middle and Working class, lower classes. Membership in a social class can for ...

has a large effect on long-term health outcomes. The way that GPET-Q did this , was queries being built around keys dates and medical

Read code Read codes are a clinical terminology system that was in widespread use in General Practice in the United Kingdom until around 2018, when NHS England switched to using SNOMED CT. Read codes are still in use in Scotland and in England are permitted ...

s to define the conditions that were being sought for a particular collection of data. As the life-span of the system continued this moved to use

SNOMED CT SNOMED CT or SNOMED Clinical Terms is a systematically organized computer-processable collection of medical terms providing codes, terms, synonyms and definitions used in clinical documentation and reporting. SNOMED CT is considered to be the mo ...

clinical codes as a way of making the extracts more specialised.

Structure

It is part of the GP Collections of

, formerly the Health and Social Care Information Centre or HSCIC. Another part is the Calculating Quality Reporting Service (CQRS). Other similar UK databases include the

Clinical Practice Research Datalink The Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD) is an observational and interventional research service that operates as part of the Department of Health (United Kingdom), UK Department of Health. It is jointly funded by the National Institute for ...

and

The Health Improvement Network The Health Improvement Network (THIN) is a large database of anonymised electronic medical records collected at primary care clinics throughout the UK. The THIN database is owned and managed by The Health Improvement Network Ltd in collaboration wi ...

. It pursues similar work to UK public health observatories.

References

External links

NHS Digital
{{Public health 2014 establishments in England British medical research Computer-related introductions in 2014 Databases in England Epidemiological study projects General practice Medical databases in the United Kingdom Medical records National Health Service (England) Public Health England Public health research

History

Function

Structure

See also

References

External links