Cloud-based telephony - supporting information for suppliers

Cloud-Based Telephony (CBT) data should be provided on a monthly basis. Data should be provided between the 1st and 5th of each month and should pertain to the previous month’s activity. Data will be requested to flow until a point when the Direction is withdrawn or the provision of data is no longer needed; this will be reviewed annually as part of the GP contract consultations.

As explained in the 'Data Specification' section of the data collection webpage - you will be submitting aggregated data or call-level data. NHS England require data to be sent in CSV format, with the fields within the file to be split by a comma delimiter (,).

Where a value you wish to return contains a comma within the value (,) then you must use a double quote ("") around that value.

Submissions must adhere to the Technical Output Specifications which can be accessed in the Data Specification section on the Cloud-Based Telephony Data Collection web page.

To accompany the Technical Output Specifications, NHS England have prepared some sample files, which can also be accessed on the same web page.

The system which receives your submitted files will perform some validations on the files. The validations will check that the headers of the submitted file exactly match the required format (including case), as presented in the sample files which can be found by following the link above. Furthermore, validations will check that your files only contain data for practices included in the participation list. More details on the participation list can be found further down this guidance document. NHS England will contact you if there are validation failures.

NHS England requires data to be sent as uploads via Secure Electronic File Transfer, or SEFT. The decision to use SEFT was communicated to system suppliers on 14 October 2024, and a further request was sent that week to request some basic details to allow our Data Collections Service to set up a SEFT account. 

For SEFT accounts to be set up, we request that you tell us the:

• name of supplier company
• name of user 1
• email of user 1 - please ensure this is not a generic mailbox address
• name of user 2 (optional)
• email of user 2 (optional) - please ensure this is not a generic mailbox address

Return this information to [email protected].

SEFT was selected from a range of transfer options as it balances functionality with ease of use.

User guides for the SEFT product will be sent out by NHS England’s Data Collection Service as part of the account set-up process. The SEFT user's quick help guide is also available online.

NHS England will provide a list of all participating practices to all Cloud-Based Telephony suppliers on a monthly basis in the last week of the month, leading up to the data submission window. It is very important that suppliers ensure they only ever provide data to NHS England for practices who have participated in the collection. 

GP Practices must indicate their intention to participate in the data collection via the Calculating Quality Reporting Service (CQRS), where they have to respond to an invitation to participate in order to take a ‘positive action’. Practices, as data controllers of the data that is provided to NHS England, are required to take a ‘positive action’ to participate in the service as a means of providing permission to suppliers, which act as data processors on behalf of practices, to extract and provide the required data to NHS England. Suppliers should direct any queries from GP Practices around participation to NHS England.

An ODS code (also called an organisation code) is a unique code created by the Organisation Data Service within the NHS, and used to identify organisations across health and social care.

The ODS Portal provides a quick and easy search facility for organisation details. Users can search using organisation/practitioner name, address or postcode.

Alternatively, ODS publish a quarterly file that provides a full list of all GP practices with their address details. That can be accessed by using the 'epraccur' file, which can be downloaded or accessed via an API.

The 'epraccur' file can be found on our GP and GP practice related data page.

NHS England will update the participation list monthly, and users should refer to the 'use by' date in the filename to ensure the list they download is current.

The participation list will be available as a download via your SEFT account; the download transfer will appear as Cloud_Based_Telephony_Download. Downloads are also covered in the SEFT guide provided above.

Where a practice, which has opted in to the service via CQRS, informs you directly that they no longer wish to participate in the service and thus do not wish for their data to be shared with NHS England, you must direct them to amend their consent within CQRS. This is consistent with the content of the data provision notice (DPN) which was issued to practices by NHS England. If they do not do this, they will continue to be listed as participating in the service in the participation reports that are provided by NHS England each month. It is this participation list which suppliers use as the basis for ensuring you (and other organisations acting on your behalf) only provide data to NHS England for participating practices.

As the data that is provided to NHS England is not considered to be personal data and therefore not in scope of UK GDPR, we do not envisage that a data breach of this kind would require notification to the Information Commissioner's Office. We would however contact affected practices to outline the data breach and the actions that we will take to rectify the issue (such as by deleting that practice's data).

In the event that a practice, which has not opted in to the service via CQRS, informs you directly that they now wish to participate in the collection, you should direct them to opt in via CQRS. Again, this is outlined in the DPN which was issued to practices by NHS England. Their data will not be shared with NHS England until they have opted in to the service using CQRS, and then the opt-in will be reflected in the participation report NHS England sends each month.

From a contractual perspective, the intention to share management information to other contracting authorities such as NHS England or the National Commercial and Procurement Hub is covered in Clause 8.5 of the Advanced Cloud Based Telephony contract (ACBT-Appendix B). This was reinforced by the addition from 10 December 2023 in all ACBT contracts under the BPf a new clause 8.9 (below). The Authority referred in the clause is the contract holder which is the individual GP surgery.

8.9 ‘For the avoidance of doubt, the Supplier may share the Authority’s information relating to all aspects of this contract and/or a copy of this contract to NHS England organisations including the National Commercial and Procurement Hub at the request of such organisation, for the purposes of monitoring, managing and administering the framework and associated funding including, without limitation, for the purposes of analysing public sector expenditure and planning future procurement activities as outlined in Clause 8.5 of this Schedule 2 above.’

A practice may ask a supplier to change their participation status (to send, or to not send data) outside of the CQRS process. If a supplier receives such a request, then the supplier, as the contract holder, would not be in breach of their contract if data was sent based on the status of the CQRS.

The specification requires suppliers to send Account Number, a field defined as 'A unique account number for all corresponding GP Practices reported under the account'.

So that NHS England can determine which GP practices this data relates to, we require a reference or mapping file in CSV format be sent each month. This will tells us which practice ODS codes are covered by which accounts.

We are aware that some account numbers may have a 1:1 relationship with an ODS code, and that for others this may be a 1-to-many relationship. We have produced an example reference file showing the format required for this file.

In the event you use the ODS codes as account numbers, then please provide these in the required field in the data return and still return the reference file.

Where a single CBT account is used by multiple practices, unless individual practice data can be shared directly, this data should only be shared with NHS England when all practices are participating in the CBT collection and included in the participation file. 

Suppliers should note that any data sent for practices that are not participating in the collection (and therefore not included in the participation file) would be considered a GDPR breach and managed as appropriate.

NHS England requires data files to be submitted using the following filename format:

File Type_Suppler Name_Reporting Period Start Date_ File created date.csv

The file type section is determined by the type of data you are submitting; aggregate or call level. Note that all submissions must come with a reference data to allow mapping between Account number and practice ODS codes.

Below are some examples for the October 2024 data - note the CCYYMMDD_CCYYMMDD format for dates:

Aggregate: aggregate_SupplierName_20241001_20241101.csv
Call Level: call_level_SupplierName_20241001_20241101.csv
And your reference file: reference_SupplierName_20241001_20241101.csv

When creating aggregated metric groupings where there have been no calls in a particular group (within a particular time period for example), these should be handled by including the data item with a 0 (zero), and adhering to the CSV formatting described above.