#47 PCIT Gems: Happy New Year l Important Coding Issues l QOF Webinar & More

Coding issues affecting all clinical systems

Learning Disabilities

We communicated this issue with you previously in late November. 

PCIT subscribers have had the correct searches in their systems from version 3.3 which was deployed mid December for both IIF and the Learning Disability register for QOF.

There have been some updates to the code sets that categorise patients as having learning disabilities for QOF, IIF and all other contracts.  The code set that has been updated is LD_COD.  This is nationally specified by TRUD (Technology reference update distribution).  With this update we have seen 366 new codes added to the code list.  It is important to recognise that this is quite a normal process that usually happens without causing much disruption or difference to usual business processes – new SNOMED codes are released for new conditions and these are then released into the ref set.  Where this happens patients don’t have these new codes so it makes very little difference operationally.   This release has seen the addition of some existing codes which seem to add reasonable numbers to the LD registers (around 20-30 patients for an average practice of 8000).  

We fed back our thoughts to the relevant authorities on this issue and as a result 15 of the new codes have been identified for removal.  For TPP S1 this has already been done and your registers will be correct.  For EMIS this work is outstanding but is expected to be completed by the end of January.

COPD – Pulmonary rehabilitation

PCIT has produced searches to help identify affected patients which we will be going through in our webinar this Friday.

Practices may have noticed that the indicator for pulmonary rehab (COPD014 – an offer of referral for pulmonary rehab is made to patients with MRC score of 3 or more) has dropped significantly. This is due to the code for Pulmonary rehabilitation offered being removed at national level. Any patient who has had that code added since April 2023 now appears on the exclusion list (i.e. they do not count as achieving the indicator).

Unfortunately the ability to code that the patient has declined pulmonary rehab was removed in April 2023 (when COPD008 became COPD014). Currently the only viable method of excluding a patient is to use Excepted from COPD indicators…  

We understand that this is being looked at national level and PCIT has raised it with JCGPIT members as we feel it’s unfair to change the rules at this stage in the contract year. 

Coding issues affecting EMIS only

Home blood pressures reported via AccuRx

PCIT has produced searches to help identify affected patients which we will be going through in our webinar this Friday.

PCIT has identified that there are some coding issues relating to a Florey called “Blood pressure questionnaire”.  Because of the way that complex business rules have been interpreted by EMIS the codes saved back to the clincial system will not be recognised for inclusion in any of the QOF BP indicators.  This means that practices using AccuRx regularly for checking BP readings with patients may have had the blood pressure recorded in the records, but in a way that doesn’t count for QOF.

Ongoing Drug issues with varying MKB releases

PCIT searches for QOF have been updated to ensure they unaffected by these issues in release 3.3 installed in practice sites in mid December

See our support article which outlines the issues.  If you’re more technically minded and want the specifics you’ll find our article of known system issues of more use, which references the specific issues affecting:

• Statin drug issues affecting CHOL001, DM022, DM023
• ACEi/ARB drug issues affecting DM006, HF003
• B-blocker drug issues affecting HF006

EPS2 Bulk Signing

To get through EPS2 Bulk signing in the Awaiting Signing workflow even more quickly and with fewer mouse movements:

1. Keep your mouse hovering over the select all check box in the top left hand corner and click (to select all the check boxes, once you’ve read the details on the screen)

2. Press Tab, without moving the mouse. This makes the next button to be selected “Approve and complete selected (X tasks)“

3. Press Space bar to press this on-screen button and approve all. Go back to 1 when the new panel loads.

RSS Feed in EMIS

Please be advised that the RSS Feed has been removed in EMIS Web 9.22.2.
If you’re using a version of EMIS Web prior to release 9.22.2 you can configure the RSS feed using the instructions in the article below.

QOF S1 Target Patients Reports

Within SystmOne it is possible to see which patients have the most outstanding QOF alerts and what this means in monetary terms. The screenshots below show where this is located within the system. The result can then be sorted by outstanding number of alerts or the top 20 or whatever number you choose.