FAQ: QOF

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Why do the epilepsy and thyroid Registers show Zero Patients and consequently no Reminders?

Tip for Epilepsy and Thyroid QOF Domains

For the first six months of the QOF year the reminders from Clinical Audit are inaccurate. There are two audits available, Reporting and Monitoring. In both epilepsy and thyroid you need to have the diagnosis and a relevant prescription witin the 6 months to the reference date.

For the monitoring audit the reference date is end of the previous month, so the register of patients will be accurate, but the other lines in the domain will include activity in the last 15 months. Therefore a thyroid function test or epilepsy medication review in November last year will count and the reminder will not appear.

For the reporting audit, the reference date is April next year, so the disease register will only start to fill up in October as patients are prescribed the relevant medication.

Previously there were monitoring audits with 6, 9 and 12 months windows but these were lost in the last big update of Clinical Audit. NVUG has requested that they are reinstated. Until then there are some ways to work around.

You can now easily search on the disease registers of the monitoring audits. For the thyroid domain, search on the thyroid registers of the monitoring audits and find everyone who does not have a TSH measurement since 1/1/09. Save the patients to a group then add a reminder to this group. At the beginning of next month you need to remove the reminder from the group; repeat the search; save to a group then add the reminder.

The same can be done for epilepsy. In this case you need to look for patients without a Clinical entry since 1/1/10 of the Read code of 6675, 667F or 667P - 667V for seizure frequency or 8B1F, 667X, 6677-667A for epilepsy medication review. If you search for Clinical entries you will find entries made using these codes both in the history or Structured Data Areas (SDA).

Category: QOF