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New Medicine Service (NMS)

Following the expansion of the New Medicine Service (NMS) in September 2021, there was an ambition to develop clinical IT systems that would support contractors and staff providing the service. This was part of the agreement on Year 3 of the Community Pharmacy Contractual Framework.

These clinical IT systems will support staff in their consultations with patients and make sure that contractors can record accurate consultation data. This is per the service specification developed with Community Pharmacy England (CPE). The clinical IT system will then submit relevant clinical data to us. This means pharmacy staff will not need to manually transcribe data or access multiple systems, such as the NHSBSA Snap S­urvey or Information Services Portal.

This will bring data reporting on NMS in line with other NHS clinical services, including:

  • NHS Community Pharmacist Consultation Service
  • NHS Pharmacy Contraception Service
  • Community Pharmacy Seasonal Influenza Vaccination Advanced Service
  • NHS Community Blood Pressure Check Service

Unlike these services, there will be no change to the current process that pharmacy contractors and staff follow to submit for the payment of completed NMS claims.

Implementation of the NMS Application Programming Interface to support data collection

An Application Programming Interface (API) will transfer of data to us. This will enable the automatic collection of NMS data from contractors providing the service. We will use this data to support the monitoring of the service and for post payment verification purposes.

We’ve worked with pharmacy system suppliers to assure their NMS modules, including the API. This work was successful, and the API went live on 1 December 2023.

From 1 December 2023, the only collection route for the voluntary submission of NMS data is through the API. There is no manual option to submit service data. Pharmacy contractors wanting to submit NMS data need to make sure they are using an approved clinical IT system to document their consultation records for the service from 1 December 2023.

Claims for payment 

There will be no change to the current process that pharmacy contractors and staff follow to submit for the payment of completed NMS claims. They will continue to enter claims for payment manually each month using the electronic submission form (FP34C) on the Manage Your Service (MYS) portal in line with Drug Tariff determinations.

Plans are in progress to enable clinical IT systems using APIs to support payment claims for NMS in the future. Once this work is completed and a combined data reporting and claims process is applied, the use an approved clinical IT system will become mandatory. We will then retire the current manual MYS claim process for the service. We’ll let contractors know about this change once a target date has been set to go live.

NMS quarterly data submissions

Pharmacy contractors will know that the requirement to submit their completed NMS quarterly summary data to us had been suspended since 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Earlier this year, NHS England agreed with CPE to restart submissions of NMS quarterly summary data on a voluntary basis to support long term monitoring. This is part of ongoing work to expand the NMS to include more therapeutic areas, and to provide evidence of service delivery for the new therapeutic areas.

Manual submissions of summary data were discontinued once the API was implemented. Quarter 2 of 2023 to 24 (1 July to 30 September 2023) was the final data return requested to be submitted to us.