NHS England warns GPs of data risks after vendor collapse

NHS England has warned hundreds of GP practices about risks to patient data and service continuity after Silicon Practice Digital Health Solutions went into administration. The collapse of the vendor, owned by Schappit Ltd, has caused some GP websites to go offline completely. Kevin Humphries, CTO of NHS England, wrote to practices outlining priorities for mitigating the impact of the tech service collapse.

Practices are advised to preserve historical patient information not yet moved to clinical systems and manage online consultation backlogs. They must also identify channels for patient access until new online systems are available. NHS England suggested practices consider their legal obligation to inform the Information Commissioner's Office if data availability or integrity is affected. Integrated Care Boards are responsible for finding someone to lead recovery plans and assessing whether to enact business continuity measures.

Questions are being raised about the due diligence conducted before Schappit Ltd was added to a government framework in July. In response, Marcus Baw published a free, open-source template for an alternative GP website. The template is based on accessible NHS web standards and matches the look-and-feel of common NHS websites. Baw stated that practices can deploy the template for free to take back in-house control of their website.