EMIS Web - System Differences

Created by James Harley, Modified on Tue, 11 Apr, 2023 at 12:06 PM by James Harley

There are 3 varieties of EMIS Web used across England and all based around the core system:

System	Description
GP (Primary Care)	Used in a standard GP Practice. Has GP links, EPS, regular patients etc
Clinical Services	This is what the GP Federations/PCNs have (in a relatively small guise – in terms of numbers of users) – used for services that can be run in or outside of GP practices by a number of services/provider units, including small community teams. Has access to the Spine (PDS, SCR, EPS, GP Connect)
CCMH (Community, Child and Mental Health)	Scaled up version of the above configured and deployed for full community teams, delivering multitude of adult and children’s services across a healthcare economy- DN, HV, CM teams, school health, children’s services, child health etc. usually with 800-5000 users in multiple teams and services and locations.

Why non-GP organisations (i.e. GP Federations/PCNs) cannot use EMIS Web GP

The GP version of EMIS Web is provided solely under the GPSoC (now GP IT Futures) contract with HSCIC and has a specific funding and payment mechanism. So the end user has to be a GP practice. EMIS cannot provide the GP IT Futures GP version of the system outside of this framework.

Also there is a technical reason – if the non-GP organisation system was the same as the GP system, each time a patient was registered, it would be possible for the GP links functionality to request a deduction of that patient from their actual registered practice as the GP system lets regular patients only be registered to one practice at a time – this would cause chaos, and prove to be difficult to administer locally as well as costly to local practices who contract payments would be affected.

There is also some slightly different functionality in several areas that the clinical services version of the software becomes more flexible for use in data sharing with GP practices. Such as the use of the patient administration model that allows for this to be the mechanism to establish the legitimate relationship between the extended service or other service and the GP practices so that the referral path can (if chosen to) drive the data sharing. This cannot be the case if the GP system is used.