How do I increase my practice’s QOF using DXS?

Author: Will Brown
Date: 29/02/2021

QOF is one of the key focuses of most (if not all) GP practices and is a staple discussion topic with our customers (especially towards ‘National Prevalence Day’).

Ensuring the greatest outcome of QOF, not only ensures the greatest care for your patients, but can also increase your practice’s income by £1000s.

There are 2 main ways that QOF income can be maximised:

• Ensuring correct diagnosis coding of QOF disease areas.
• Ensuring all the necessary work is completed for all these patients.

Within our CompleteCare product (free to GP IT-F BestPathway / Point-of-Care customers):

Correct diagnosis coding

As part of our suite of templates and reports, we have a selection of missed diagnosis reports (some practices reference as ‘case finding’, ‘missed opportunity / income’, or ‘increase payment’).

These reports identify patients that are likely miscoded and/or do not have the correct diagnosis code for QOF conditions, meaning that they are not put on the appropriate condition registers.

EXAMPLES OF SUCH PATIENTS ARE:

• Patients seen in Memory Assessment Clinic for review with no Dementia diagnosis
• Patients with prescriptions / repeat for inhaler with no Asthma diagnosis
• Use of ‘History Of’ (H/O prefixed codes) that do not confirm active diagnosis e.g., H/O COPD

By not having these patients on the correct register, you may unintentionally not actively be managing them and their condition or completing the necessary work and not getting the payment attributed to it.

How can I correct these codes?

Firstly, we need to identify these prospective patients using the clinical or population reporting in both SystmOne and EMIS.

These reports can be found:

SystmOne
Reporting > Clinical Reporting > DXS Toolkits > DXS Missed Diagnosis Reports


EMIS
Reporting > Population Reporting > DXS CompleteCare > DXS Missed Diagnosis Reports


Once the reports are run to identify the patients, their diagnosis will need one of the following actions.

• Record the Diagnosis
• Exclude the Diagnosis (e.g., patients being suggested medication but its treatment is not in relation to a QOF diagnosis)
• Remove / Delete / Mark in Error a previous diagnosis

Points 1 and 2 are quickly and easily achieved using DXS QOF templates or Comprehensive (LTC-Review) templates where these are the first questions asked.

Completing the necessary work

Each QOF may have a number of requirements to ensure that patient care is met, and payment can be attributed.

To help with this, our CompleteCare tool has a number of ways that we support our practices.

Use of our ‘Quick-QOF’ templates:

These templates ensure the minimum data set (MDS) of the required information is captured and help with quick and efficient data capture to satisfy reporting requirements.

These forms also link to other useful criteria like scored assessments / investigations in the clinical system and patient information and referral forms in Point-of-Care.

Type – ‘DXS – Quick’ in your clinical system’s search field box to find these templates.