The National Duplicate Registration Initiative (NDRI) is the Audit Commission's exercise that matches data from various sources to review general practitioners' (GPs) patient lists. It helps identify inaccuracies in the GP list that distort how funds are allocated within the NHS and specifically payments made to GPs.
By tackling these inaccuracies the initiative also helps patients' medical records to be transferred to their new GP where previously the system was unable to link the patient's old and new GP registrations.
NDRI 2009/10
This is the third time the Audit Commission has undertaken a NDRI exercise at all primary care trusts in England and, working with the Auditor General for Wales, at local health boards in Wales. The work was carried out as part of the statutory audit of primary care trust and local health board accounts in 2009/10. The NDRI was undertaken in 1999 and in 2004. The 2004 report is available to download below.
The GP patient list data is held on the national health applications and infrastructure services (NHAIS) system. A snap-shot of the data was extracted from the NHAIS system in October 2009 for the NDRI. This data was then cross-matched between local systems and with a variety of other databases to help find duplicates or inaccuracies in the data. These can occur for a number of reasons, for example because the patient has died or has moved house, and should therefore have been removed from a list.
Where potential inaccuracies or irregularities were seen, these 'matches' were passed back to NHAIS sites through the Commission's secure NDRI web application between December 2009 and January 2010. The NHAIS sites then reviewed the matches and reported patient list removals back to the Audit Commission through the same secure system.
Over 95,000 registered patients were removed from the GP list as a result of the NDRI 2009/10. The annual savings to primary care trusts from the NDRI 2009/10 removals exceed £6.1 million. This is a short term saving. In the long term, the improved data quality will help to more accurately distribute funding.