A consultation has been launched by NHS England on digital first primary care, depending on the results this could result in Babylon’s GP at Hand being stripped of its primary care network by April 2020.
The consultation is trying to find a solution to four problems that GP at Hand has highlighted: should out-of-area registration rules be changed to provide for digital providers and primary care networks (PCN); should changes to made to the new patient registration premium and should it only be paid after a set period; should Clinical Commission Group (CCG) allocation reflect in-year patient flow; and should a wider array of digital first providers be available.
NHS England has proposed changes that will help address funding inequalities between local GP practices and digital first providers and also addressing the problem of high patient turnover associated with digital services.
One of the proposals is to automatically create a new patient list when a threshold number of out-of-area patients have been registered.
Full story in Digital Health, 2 July 2019
