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Prescription Pricing Division
Remuneration & Reimbursement of Dispensing Contractor
in England
The NHSBSA Prescription Pricing Division processes over
two million prescription items per working day, determining
reimbursement and remuneration levels through to payment.
Annual payments to contractors made on behalf of the
NHS now total around £7 billion. These payment services
centre on the direct reimbursement and remuneration
of pharmacy contractors in England, the provision of
payment schedules covering dispensing doctors and personal
administration by GPs in England and schedules for Jersey
and Guernsey.
Processing relies on a cycle of activities. Monthly
paper prescription batches are submitted by 10,000 community
pharmacy contractors. Contractor reimbursement and remuneration
is calculated and payments are made through linked computer
systems. This process is undergoing redevelopment to
introduce a solution based on optical scanning, intelligent
character recognition and automatic rules processing
with residual exception handling by manual intervention.
Electronic Transmission of Prescriptions (ETP) is being
developed by NHS Connecting for Health. The effect of
ETP will result in a high proportion of prescriptions
being handled electronically over time, thus reducing
paper handling, scanning, ICR and storage requirements.
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Provision of Financial, Prescribing and Drug information
The NHSBSA Prescription Pricing Division provides information
services to 35,000 prescribers and to managing organisations
within the NHS in England. Five years prescribing, financial
and drug information, for all prescribers in England,
is made available to the NHS and the DH to assist in
determining the most cost effective use of drugs in
treating patients within primary care. The data arise
from transactions used to calculate the reimbursement
and remuneration of contractors dispensing drugs and
medical devices in a community setting. These information
services represent electronic, web-based and distributed
systems that enable these data sources to be analysed
by clinicians, financial managers and others through
data mining and manipulation. Information is available
from the level of an individual drug presentation at
prescriber level to its total use in Primary Care in
England.
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European Health Insurance Card
In addition, the NHSBSA Prescription Pricing Division
administers the application process and distribution
of European Health Insurance Cards to the UK population
on behalf of the Department of Health. This service,
which is in excess of 10 million transactions per annum,
is based on internet, telephone and postal applications.
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Help With Health Costs
The NHSBSA Prescription Pricing Division provides a
service across England and in certain cases to other
parts of the UK, to provide exemption certificates to
those entitled to them and to provide upon application
and payment prescription pre-payment certificates. These
services range between the calculation of entitlement
to certain health benefits based on data entry of submitted
paper forms to the issue of pre-payment certificates
purchased through a range of channels including phone
and internet sales routes. These services are provided
to over 5 million patients annually. back
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