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.

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