This session was supported by Ann Shaw, Lead Primary Care Informatics Facilitator at Derwent Shared Services, and Kate Rees, Practice Nurse at the Riversdale Surgery in Belper, Derbyshire, and Nurse Lead and IM&T DES Assessor for Derbyshire County PCT. Ann and Kate explained what they found had worked and what lessons they took away from the pilots, from a facilitator's and clinical assessor's point of view.

In the first half of the session, Dr Dai Evans, PRIMIS+ Clinical Adviser, and Helen Atkinson, PRIMIS+ Business Development Consultant, explained the work that PRIMIS+ had been asked to do by NHS Connecting for Health in order to deliver training and support for practices working towards accreditation under the IM&T DES. Helen and Dai also showcased the PRIMIS+ data analysis tool, CHART Online, and detailed the e-audit queries (a library of 16 query sets containing over 100 queries) that had been developed for the DES.

Then, Ann and Kate were able to highlight how they had found the pilot process, what issues they had uncovered and dealt with, what worked well and any lessons learned.

Derwent Shared Services was one of ten PRIMIS+ schemes chosen for the IM&T DES pilot which took place in early Autumn 2006. Each scheme worked with four or five participating practices, making the pilot a very comprehensive trial. The schemes chosen to take part all had a variety of clinical systems and clinical code versions across their practices, and their facilitators varied from those just starting out, to highly skilled and experienced specialists in health informatics.

Ann and Kate's ‘lessons learned' included the following key areas that anyone involved in the IM&T DES could consider:

Assessors could really benefit from the support of a mentor, supervisor or experienced assessor person during their first visit. Kate also found it useful to have someone to take notes.

• Plan ahead! It is essential to have a detailed plan for all your practices, and to keep it updated after each visit. This ensures that time is allocated fairly across the practices.
• Make sure you communicate regularly with your practices, and don't forget that PRIMIS+ is there to offer help and support.
• Making sure that everyone allocates enough time is crucial. Practices should plan enough time to work on data quality issues, preparing and updating protocols and amending ways of working (which will need input from a clinician, and not just the practice or IT manager). Facilitators could use an Action Plan to ensure everything is completed for the practice's planned accreditation date and practices need to remember to factor in time for the accreditation visits.
• Remember that you can review the data reports drawn up by the e-audit queries again and again. This is important to ensure that processes have been amended where necessary and any areas of difficulty are quickly resolved.
• Use CHART and CHART Online, and upload the anonymised data to review comparatively.
• The IM&T DES can be seen as a reward in itself for the hard work that everyone at the practice and PCT has put in. The end result and benefit is that patient records are ‘fit for sharing'.

To find out more about the IM&T DES, CHART Online and the e-audit queries please visit the IM&T DES area on the PRIMIS+ website.