Developments in NMS IT support planned for December

NHS England has announced that NHS approved IT systems for recording NMS consultations and sharing data with the NHSBSA are due to be ready from 1st December 2023.

This development follows negotiations with NHS England and the Department of Health and Social Care where it has previously been agreed that IT support for CPCF clinical services will be updated to allow information on services provided and payment claims to automatically flow from pharmacy IT systems to the NHSBSA.

This work has already been completed for several of the CPCS clinical services, with the development of application programming interfaces (API) between pharmacy IT systems and the NHSBSA’s Manage Your Service (MYS) portal.

The New Medicine Service (NMS) is next in line for completion of this work and NHS England has issued an email update to pharmacy owners, stating the target go-live date for updated pharmacy clinical IT systems and the API is 1st December 2023, with Cegedim and Positive Solutions on track to meet that date.

However, unlike the previous releases of updated pharmacy clinical IT systems and APIs for CPCS clinical services, to begin with, there will be no change to the current manual end of month claim for the NMS via the electronic submission form (FP34C) within MYS.

Transition to the mandatory use of approved IT systems for NMS

Changes need to be made to NHSBSA systems before data being sent from approved pharmacy clinical IT systems via the API to MYS can be used to populate end of month claims for NMS provisions.

Plans are in place for these changes to be made, with completion of these expected at some point in 2024. Once that work at the NHSBSA is completed, pharmacy owners providing the NMS will need to use an approved clinical IT system to keep their clinical records for the service and to submit data on the provision of the service and payment claims to MYS. At that time, the current manual MYS claim process for the service will be retired.

Notice of this change will be communicated to pharmacy owners in advance, once a target go-live date has been set.

However, until that time, pharmacy owners can choose to use one of the approved pharmacy clinical IT systems (once available) to maintain their clinical records and voluntarily provide data on the provision of NMS via the MYS API.

Alternatively, they can continue to use other NMS records systems, for example in their PMR system.

Find out more about which IT systems are developing updated modules for NMS

Once it becomes mandatory to use an approved IT system with an API, some pharmacy owners may have to change the system in which they keep their NMS records.

We suggest pharmacy owners check with their current NMS IT system provider to see whether they are planning to meet the new IT standards and implement the API.

The current quarterly NMS data submission system

The mandatory requirement to submit quarterly summary data on the NMS to the NHSBSA has been suspended since 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Earlier this year we agreed with NHS England to restart submissions of this quarterly data on a voluntary basis.

Once approved IT systems are available for NMS, voluntary submissions of quarterly summary data will be stopped.

The final quarter for which pharmacy owners can choose to submit their NMS quarterly summary data will be Quarter 2 of 2023/24 (1st July – 30th September 2023). Any voluntary submissions should be made by 30th November 2023.

Summary of these changes

Further information

CPCF clinical services IT requirements