You can, but you shouldn’t. Electronic health records are easy to obtain, relatively simple to use, and deliver a number of clinical safety benefits.
We recommend using an established NHS GP record system, rather than a system designed for the private sector.
Why? Because the established NHS systems EMISWeb and Systm1 have scale, with 1000s of sites using them daily. They have a broad network of individuals available to support their implementation and running. They will be familiar to any GP you want to work with.
Functionally, they have all key features inbuilt, and a wide ecosystem of partner products for any features not within the core product. Most critically, they are maintained to meet the CQCs latest guidance and they allow for easy interoperability with NHS GP sites.
Although there are private sector systems available, they have a fraction of the scale of the NHS systems (private GPs represent <5% of all GPs nationally – so even if one private sector system was dominant, it would still be small compared to EMIS or S1). This means they struggle to keep up with the development needs of changing regulations, and often end up being sold or poorly supported.
They often offer poor levels of interoperability, so if you are unhappy it is hard to migrate away (where as the NHS systems are required to make data available in a format that is easy for you to switch to another NHS system).
Hero Health is an EMIS partner product, designed to enable EMIS for use in private practice.
There are a multitude of factors that explain why electronic patient records have replaced traditional paper record keeping. Key reasons include:
Submit your question here and we'll get our experts to review
Keep up to date with the latest private general practice news, resources and systems.
Our 1-minute newsletter, delivered monthly
