CQRS Local drives efficiencies for South West London CCG
South West London CCG (now NHS South West London Integrated Care Board) has been one of five early adopters to start using Calculating Quality Reporting Service (CQRS) Local. As soon as they heard about the new system, and what it could do, in relation to saving administrative time and other efficiencies they quickly got on board.
“We started to use CQRS Local, the day it became available. We were quite keen to get involved in the CQRS Local user group. We had received the onboarding journey documents, and so were already familiar with the concept of CQRS Local and its obvious benefits.”
“It was a very smooth process to onboard to the system because we had some initial discussions with the training and implementation team, who demonstrated the system. We discussed as a commissioner, what we wanted to use CQRS Local for and how we could achieve our objectives.”
The CSU Collaborative has worked with local organisations to cater to all the schemes running at a local level. There is no limit to the number of services that can be commissioned, and because the system is all set up for Directed Enhanced Services (DES), Local Enhanced Services (LES), and Local Incentive Schemes (LIS), all the commissioner has to do is create the new contract, and send it out to all participating GP practices, who will be able to view which contracts they are eligible for and can process claims against.
Onboarding support
As part of the onboarding, the CSU will learn about your current systems and local schemes. The process includes training your commissioning team to configure and use the system and includes delivering GP practice-specific training via e-learning.
“We had all the support that we needed during onboarding for CQRS Local. As a collaborative CSU programme, the support has been seamless – the CSUs all worked together and are a great resource.”
“In the lead-up to going live, we had discussions about system functionality and how we could work with them. The service desk has been professional in dealing with issues and feeding back updates or solutions.”
Processing claims
One of the real benefits of the new system is that the primary care provider gets an instant notification when the claim has been approved. Practices can check the status of current claims on CQRS Local and track where they are up to in the approval process. This provides a fool proof way of claims processing, whereas, before CQRS Local, there was no easy way of following up if the claims had been received or had been approved by commissioners.
“Our reason for using CQRS Local was to streamline the process of dealing with practice claims for the Minor Surgery DES. Previously, we would have to spend time preparing a claim form in an Excel spreadsheet and send it out to practices. We would then receive the claims back into our shared mailbox, sift them from all the other emails we receive and save them for processing.”
“Processing involved opening the email, the claim form, and then the supporting evidence for the claim to be able to validate it. Once approved, the details needed to be entered into another spreadsheet and once all the claims had been processed, the payment details had to be transferred to another spreadsheet to send to our finance team.”
“They would then have to transfer the details onto yet another spreadsheet before uploading to PCSE Online for payment. As far as practices were concerned, once they had sent the original claim in by email, it disappeared into a black hole to hopefully emerge as a payment in the following month.”
“Using CQRS Local reduces the need for practices to just hope we received their claims, didn’t lose them in filing, and that they don’t need to contact us, asking whether their claim has been received and processed. They are able to track them in the system and whether they have been approved ready for processing.”
Drives efficiencies
The use of CQRS Local has saved time and effort for South West London CCG and made the entire process visible to practices to monitor the progress of their claim.
As a commissioner, who was part of the pilot phase of the system implementation, they are helping to drive efficiencies with CQRS Local and make it a flexible system for all who use it.
“The CSUs were supportive of our involvement in the end-user working group because we’ve helped to shape the functionality of CQRS Local. It was useful to have input into a new system designed for commissioners.”
“We provided a lot of insight into the design of CQRS Local, which included user access rights, reporting, dealing with claims, filters, and search quantities and issues with providers – some of which have been included in the functionality now.”
“Another positive of CQRS Local for us will be the direct link to PCSE for payments, which we also hope to realise the benefits of soon.”
“CQRS Local will drive efficiencies and save a lot of administrative time for both commissioners and the practices. Though the biggest benefit has to be visibility of the claims in the process for us all, and the second is security.”
If commissioners have chosen to use the CQRS Local system, they will require practices to submit claims via the system, to obtain payment. Payments are made from the commissioner directly to the GP practice bank account, in the same way as they are for national QOF payments.
“CQRS Local is the answer that we have long hoped for, in dealing with practice claims and payments. It reduces the effort and improves the whole process for all involved.”
