NHS quango warns of risk to GP patient data after website vendor collapse

Hundreds of practices hit by small health tech firm going into administration

The UK's top health quango has called on family doctors to figure out how to preserve health information and get in touch with patients after a website provider collapsed earlier this month.

NHS England has taken the unusual step of writing to GPs, warning them of the risks to patient information and continuity of service following the disruption to potentially hundreds of practices around the UK.

Silicon Practice Digital Health Solutions — owned by Schappit Ltd — has gone into administration. Reports suggest some GP websites have gone offline completely. Practice managers fear the extra workload and are struggling to stand up alternative forms of communication since the switch to digital channels.

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NHS England is the government unit which runs the health service in England, but it is not directly responsible for GP practices, the vast majority of which are independent contractors.

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Nonetheless, the quango’s CTO, Kevin Humphries, wrote to practices and NHS organizations this week outlining his priorities in mitigating the impact of tech service collapse.

They include finding ways of preserving any historical patient information, particularly where it has not been moved to clinical systems, managing the online consultation backlog to make sure no additional requests are added, and identifying channels for patient access until new online systems are available.

Practices should also consider whether they have a legal obligation to tell the Information Commissioner's Office if the "availability, integrity, confidentiality or recoverability of personal data" is affected, according to the communication seen by The Register.

NHS management bodies called Integrated Care Boards are responsible for GP IT service arrangements, making sure they include "clinical safety, data security, cyber security and business continuity assurance across the GP IT supply chain," Humphries said.

They need to find someone to lead their recovery plan and contact affected practices and trusts. They should also "work with practices and other impacted organizations to support them in revisiting and assessing whether to enact business continuity and disaster recovery plans," Humphries said.

Questions over how an urgent NHS-wide response is required for the collapse of a relatively small supplier may come later. Among them will be the due diligence conducted before Schappit Ltd was added to a government framework in July.

GP and open-source tech campaigner Marcus Baw has published a free, open source template for an alternative website should practices want to bring systems in-house. He said the template is based on accessible NHS web standards, and has the same look-and-feel of common NHS websites.

"Practices can deploy it for free, and take back in-house control of their own website. It's a replacement website template which practices can set up using Claude Code in the web in an afternoon," he said. ®