The General Practice Extraction Service (GPES or GP Extraction Service) was a British health service outcomes research computer database that collates

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

aggregated data (demographic cohorts) 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 health care, care across time within one particular health care provide ...

s of GPs in

England England is a Countries of the United Kingdom, country that is part of the United Kingdom. It is located on the island of Great Britain, of which it covers about 62%, and List of islands of England, more than 100 smaller adjacent islands. It ...

, 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 de ...

research. It may conflict with sensitive medical

confidentiality Confidentiality involves a set of rules or a promise sometimes executed through confidentiality agreements that limits the access to or places restrictions on the distribution of certain types of information. Legal confidentiality By law, la ...

. It is similar to

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

epidemiology Epidemiology is the study and analysis of the distribution (who, when, and where), patterns and Risk factor (epidemiology), determinants of health and disease conditions in a defined population, and application of this knowledge to prevent dise ...

, and a health information exchange.

History

With advances in computing technology and databases, many more types of public health research, including time-consuming cohort studies, are now possible; sifting through health data is quicker. Medical conditions 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, 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 (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. Numerous fails of standard Disaster Recovery 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 ind ...

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; ) is the executive office of the UK Statistics Authority, a non-ministerial department which reports directly to the Parliament of the United Kingdom, UK Parliament. Overview The ONS is responsible fo ...

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 SE is a European multinational information technology (IT) service and consulting company with headquarters in Bezons suburb of Paris, France, and offices worldwide. It specialises in hi-tech transactional services, unified communicat ...

, a large

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

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 or social stratum is a grouping of people into a set of Dominance hierarchy, hierarchical social categories, the most common being the working class and the Bourgeoisie, capitalist class. Membership of a social class can for exam ...

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 Medical terminology, 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 ...

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 NHS Digital, formerly the Health and Social Care Information Centre or HSCIC. Another part is the

Calculating Quality Reporting Service A calculation is a deliberate mathematical process that transforms a plurality of inputs into a singular or plurality of outputs, known also as a result or results. The term is used in a variety of senses, from the very definite arithmetical ...

(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 and Social Care. It is jointly funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research ( ...

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