NYCC New Claims Procedure for Services

North Yorkshire County Council commissions community pharmacies to provide a number of public health services. Currently community pharmacies can opt to provide any of the following services:

– Emergency Hormonal Contraception (EHC)
– Stop Smoking service
– Needle Exchange
– Supervised Consumption
– Alcohol Identification and Brief Advice (IBA)

North Yorkshire County Council plans to introduce a new system to replace the existing claim procedure. The new system is PharmOutcomes. Community pharmacies should already be familiar with this system as they use it in other areas of their work. From 1 September 2015 all claims for the above services should be via PharmOutcomes; claims via the excel spreadsheets will no longer be accepted.

PharmOutcomes is a web-based system which allows community pharmacies to maintain individual level records as part of a locally commissioned service and payment claims are automatically created on a monthly basis. The commissioner can view live data on the services at any time, and the system supports audit, performance management and benchmarking of these services.

All community pharmacies should already have a login for PharmOutcomes. If you are already signed up with NYCC to provide these services then once the public health services have been activated you will automatically see them when you log on. The Alcohol IBA service is already active on the system; the remaining services should be active on 1 September. If you have lost your password, or need a new login please go to https://www.pharmoutcomes.org/pharmoutcomes/help/home

When you are logged on simply click on the ‘Service’ tab and choose the appropriate service title from the list of ‘Provider Services’. This takes the Provider to the data capture page associated with that service delivery. The required information for each question should either be entered in the text boxes provided or selected from options boxes or drop down lists that appear in the service delivery screen. When all questions have been answered simply click the ‘save’ button at the bottom of the page to validate the data collected. This action will bring up a prompt saying ‘The form was validated and the data has been saved successfully’. This confirms that all required data has been collected by the service provider. Invoices or service claims are automatically created by PharmOutcomes alongside service delivery. The act of saving patient facing data in PharmOutcomes creates a claim for the provider. The claims are automatically extracted by the system and sent by PharmOutcomes to the Commissioner for payment.

In addition to introducing PharmOutcomes, we are planning to introduce a revised sexual health service that will replace the existing EHC service. The sexual health service will be open to all community pharmacies in North Yorkshire to provide. The service will provide EHC (either Levonelle or EllaOne as appropriate) free of charge to 13 to 24 year olds; and for these clients they will also be offered condoms and a chlamydia screening kit. All community pharmacies in North Yorkshire will receive further information about this directly during mid-August.

For further information please contact Georgina.Wilkinson@northyorks.gov.uk