EMIS Web for Private Practices

In the current market place, EMIS Web is probably the best Clinical System for Private Practices.  

https://www.theprivategpforum.co.uk/news-article/what-is-the-best-private-gp-record-system

Migrating to EMIS presents significant benefits to private practices, particularly those that wish to work alongside the NHS (e.g., referring to NHS services, viewing GP records, sharing consultation notes, etc.). Integrating with a product such as Hero Health offers further advantages, including a digital front door, appointments, invoicing, payments, electronic prescribing, and messaging (https://www.herohealthsoftware.net/private-care/home). 

What I have learned so far is that EMIS Web will require different configurations and setups, depending on whether the private practice wishes to interact with the NHS or not. 

Organisation Specialty - General Medical Practice

A Private Practice would ideally wish to register a patient as 'Private'.  To be able to get a patient type of Private, Specilaities in the organisation details must be set to General Medical Practice:

When Registering a Patient, Private, along with numerous other patient types, becomes an option:

However, because the speciality 'General Medical Practice' is for NHS GP Practices, the private organisation will be prompted to configure a GP Link Trading Partner:

Care needs to be taken at which registration types are made active. For instance, the registration type of 'Regular' could impact the patient’s registration due to GP links, which, at worst, could remove the patients registration from their NHS GP practice and GP to GP record transfer which could also have other far reaching impacts.

Another benefit the patient types above present is the patients Home Address is mandatory:

This delivers real benefits particularly when integrating with third party tools such as Hero Health Invoicing where the patients home address is mandatory for producing an invoice.

Summary

Registering 'Private; patients should be the default option for Private Practices.  Unfortunately only by setting up the EMIS Organisation as General Medical Practice does this become available.  Because General Medical Practice is set up for NHS GP Practices this would bring additional challenges such as GP Links.

For private practices who wish to integrate with other NHS Services, should they be using the organisation specialty - General Medical Practice to access NHS Services?  For example, will they need to be set up with GP Links?  Considerations need to be made around PDS, Smartcards, GP Connect (access to shared records, send documents), e-Referrals, Pathology Links, ...)

Speciality - All specialties (remove General Medical Practice) 

If the Organisation Type remains as Private Clinic but the Specialty changed to something else other than to General Medical Practice (i.e. All specialties), the issue with GP Link Trading Partner goes away.  

However, by removing the Specialty, General Medical Practice, the only available Patient Registration Types are Community and Dummy.  There is no access to Configure Patient Type.

Community Registered patients also does not have mandatory fields for the patients Home Address:

As a consequence we are seeing issues at private practices using Hero Health invoicing where staff have to cancel the invoice process, add the patients address in EMIS and then go back to producing the invoice.  This is not ideal and disrupts the workflow of the practice.

Summary

EMIS need to introduce a Specialty for Private Practices that is not link to the GP Link Trading Partner and offers various Patient Registration Types such as Private.  The Patient Type, Regular should not be an option.  

To supplement third party suppliers such as Hero Health, making the patient type 'Private' the default and removing Regular whilst also making the home address mandatory in the patients record would be the desired outcome.