A new e-Audit tool has been made available, free of charge, to GP practices today, to support them to achieve accredited data quality standards and ensure their clinical data is "fit for sharing" in the NHS Care Records Service.

Developed specifically by PRIMIS+ on behalf of NHS Connecting for Health (NHS CFH), the tool is designed to support the IM&T Directed Enhanced Service (DES) under the new General Medical Services (GMS) contract. It will also facilitate IM&T adoption within GP practices, will enable "paper light" practices to benchmark and improve the quality of their clinical data and support delivery of the National Programme for IT, which is being delivered by NHS CFH.

The e-Audit Toolkit, available in the PRIMIS+ CHART software meets a key objective of the IM&T DES and was developed in collaboration with a number of professional organisations, including the General Practitioners Committee of the British Medical Association, the Royal College of General Practitioners and NHS Employers, to ensure the queries to support the accreditation standard are appropriate.

Dr Gillian Braunold, national clinical lead for GPs for NHS CFH, who chairs the Data Accreditation Board, led this project.

Dr Braunold said: "By using the e-Audit tool practices will be able to ensure their coded data is meaningful in any clinical environment, which is an essential requirement of the new NHS Care Records Service."

Dr Richard Vautrey, a GPC negotiator who is also enthusiastic about the benefits of this new tool said: "Through working together, we believe that we now have a toolkit that will prove useful for all practices that want to improve their data quality. Use of the toolkit will not only help practices achieve the standards set in the IM&T DES, but will help to ensure better quality electronic records that lead to better patient care."

Following a successful pilot scheme, in which 48 GP practices submitted anonymised practice data over the web to PRIMIS+ using CHART Online, the e-Audit tool, will be available to every practice in England via the internet at http://www.primis.nhs.uk/data-accreditation/default.asp.

GPs from the pilot sites have given valuable feedback on the ease of using CHART and submitting the results to CHART Online.

David Rose, a practice manager from Staffordshire, whose practice took part in the pilot said: "CHART e-Audit queries have been a great tool in providing our practice with the necessary information to enhance the quality of our clinical data. It takes away the worry that we had with traditional searches that we may have 'missed' important areas of data that require our attention."

By submitting their results to CHART Online, practices and their assessors will be able to compare their data with other practices in the locality or others with similar patient demographics. Practices are encouraged to download the CHART e-Audit tool now, to benchmark themselves against others and use the results to help focus on areas for improvement as they prepare to submit their application. A PCT assessor will use the results of the e-Audit to focus their data accreditation assessment in particular areas.

To further support strong information governance NHS Connecting for Health has also developed an Information Governance toolkit for practices. Following a successful pilot, this will also be shortly available to practices at https://www.igt.connectingforhealth.nhs.uk.