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General Practice IT Infrastructure Specification

It is important to become familiar with this document in order to understand what your practice is entitled to receive under GPSoC and what you will need to pay for.  You can download a copy of it from the GPSoC website. It sets out the IT infrastructure required to support clinical applications in GP practices now and in the future to ensure that:-

  1. the performance of CFH systems is not impaired by poor IT infrastructure or by the operation of practice business applications;
  2. practices and trusts to achieve lowest total cost of ownership of their IT infrastructure;
  3. responsibility for funding the purchase and support of IT infrastructure for practices is clearly understood.

It covers

  1. Funding responsibilities – what the practice or PCT pays for
  2. GPSoC functionality - the changes to GP IT to ensure that the expected applications developments as a result of GPSoC perform to specification.
  3. Infrastructure requirements for new equipment to support both NPfIT applications and practice business activity.
  4. Asset management – planned replacement of hardware and software
  5. Measures of system performance

Funding responsibilities

Under the GMS contractual arrangements, PCTs are responsible funding the purchase, maintenance, future upgrades and running costs of integrated IT systems as well as telecommunications links to branch surgeries and other NHS infrastructure and services.  (Clause 4.29 of the nGMS contract). The GPSoC Specification divides the Primary Care IT infrastructure into:

  1. ‘Core’ – which GPs are entitled to expect PCTs to support; and
  2. ‘Additional’, which may be PCT funded subject to agreement between the PCT and practice, or may be a practice responsibility.

You can find details of what are considered to be core or additional in the appendix of the Infrastructure Specification.  It is important to become familiar with how hardware and software are classified so that you can understand what your practice is entitled to receive from the PCT and what you will need to pay for yourself.

GPSoC functionality

This refers to the provision of NPfIT services such as GP2GP and hosted systems as the practices clinical system supplier moves up the ladder of the GPSoC Maturity Model,  The PCT is responsible for providing the infrastructure required by practices to allow them to use these NPfIT services.

Infrastructure requirements

This covers details of:

  1. Servers – clinical and others
  2. PCs
  3. Monitors
  4. Printers
  5. Business applications
  6. Microsoft Office
  7. Anti-Virus Applications
  8. Desktop, Asset and Patch Management
  9. Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity
  10. Local Networking
    1. Cabling
    2. Wireless Networking
    3. Switches
    4. Routers/Firewalls
    5. N3 connections
    6. Branch to Main Practices
  11. Scanning and Document Management
  12. Additional Clinical Applications
  13. CFH Applications Monitoring Report

Asset management and replacement

This includes replacement of servers and desktop PCs at planned intervals

Measures of system performance

This deals with network and N3 performance, etc.

 
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