How are electronic medical records processed by GP practices

• When a practice registers a patient it automatically in the background informs Primary Care Support England (PCSE) so they can update the National Patient Demographic Service (commonly called the spine/pds). A notification is also sent to the patients last GP practice to advise that the patient has chosen to register elsewhere. This triggers the elctronic GP2GP record to be sent to the new practice speeding up the movement of records when a patient tranfers to the new practice.
• On the few occasions where GP2GP is not sucessful a manual request is sent to the patients last practice by PCSE to ask them to print and manually send a copy of the patients full records. This can take several weeks as the old practice send the records via secure courier to PCSE who then send via curier to the new practice. 

What is GP2GP

GP2GP allows a patients electronic health records to be transferred directly when they register with the practice, securely, safely and quickly between their old and new practices when patients change GP practice.  GP2GP is part of the NHS Spine secure messaging platform, it allows GP systems to:          

• request a GP record from the old GP system
• send a GP record to the new GP system
• acknowledge receipt of the GP record
• The following link provides further information -  GP2GP - NHS England Digital