GP Connect allows GP practices and clinical staff to share GP practice clinical information and data between IT systems, quickly and efficiently via Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).
NHS England has been directed under Section 254 of the Health and Social Care Act 2012 by the Department of Health and Social Care to establish and operate the GP Connect Service. Read the signed Direction – Establishment of systems: digital interoperability platform 2019.
To comply with the Direction, NHS England is a Controller for the delivery of the GP Connect Service, which means NHS England is responsible for establishing and maintaining a service which enables interoperability between GP IT systems. For NHS England to support the GP Connect service, audit data about the message transactions is collected, which is used for operational support by service management. NHS England is a Controller for the message audit data collected on Spine.
To fulfil the role of Controller, NHS England is also responsible for the content of the messages as they traverse NHS England Infrastructure, and ensuring that they are passed securely, accurately and safely to and from provider and consumer systems for the purposes of Direct Patient Care. The content of the messages is not collected or stored by NHS England . NHS England processes the messages on behalf of the GP practices, who are Controllers of the GP patient record.
For more information, visit GP Connect privacy notice – NHS England Digital