EMIS Web - Variants

Created by James Harley, Modified on Tue, 10 Jun at 9:50 AM 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)	Designed specifically for GP practices. It focuses on managing patient care within a single GP practice. GP links is enabled by default for registering and deducting patients as per the mandatory requirements set out in the GMS contract, including maintaining a list of patients, the process for registering new patients, and the circumstances under which patients can be removed from the list. When a patient leaves the GP Practice, EMIS Web GP can create a deduction request in Registration, which is sent via the GP Links (regular patients only) to the Trading Partner (see below about Trading Partners). https://www.emisnow.com/csm?id=kb_article&sysparm_article=KB0076310
Clinical Services	This is what the GP Federations/PCN Hubs have (in a relatively small guise – in terms of numbers of users) – used for services that can be run outside of GP practices by a number of services/provider units, including enhanced services, multi-disciplinary teamwork and broader healthcare operations, including community and outpatient services. Has access to the NHS Spine (PDS, GP Connect, SCR). It should be configured not to use GP Links, so patients are not (accidentally) deducted from their regular GP Practice. Organisations running Clinical Services will pay more per user for support as EMIS will provide first line support. Clinical Services pay for each module organisations wish to activate (i.e Laboratory Links) Clinical Services sit on a shared environment, so updates (patches/fixes/enhancements, etc) that are pushed to the GP practices, follow to Clinical Services, and therefore organisations have no say when these take place. If organisations want a testing/training environment, there is an additional cost and again, it is on a shared environment. https://www.emisnow.com/csm?id=kb_article_view&sysparm_article=KB0076404
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- District and Community Nurses, Healthcare Visitors, CM teams, school health, children’s services, child health etc. usually with 800-5000 users in multiple teams, services and locations. The pricing model and the server architecture put in place are the main differences between Clinical Services and CCMH. Organisations running CCMH must provide their own first line support. Most modules for CCMH, like Mobile, NHS Spine functions are inclusive. Updates and fixes that are not pushed to CCMH. CCMH get a UAT (User Acceptance Testing) and training environment which are on separate domains, so they can manage their updates before loading into LIVE. https://www.emisnow.com/csm?id=kb_article_view&sysparm_article=KB0076413
Community Pharmacy	https://www.emisnow.com/csm?id=kb_article&sysparm_article=KB0076395

What is a Trading Partner?

A Trading Partner refers to an organisation or entity that has been set up to exchange data electronically with another organisation, typically for administrative or clinical purposes. This term is often used in the context of electronic data interchange (EDI) systems, such as EMIS Web, where trading partners are configured to facilitate the secure and efficient sharing of information.

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.