GPASS

GPASS, General Practice Administration System for Scotland, originally developed by a Scottish General Medical Practioner and Software developer, Dr Ferguson, currently owned by the Scottish Executive and developed and supported by the NHS Common Services Agency of Scotland.

Widely used (85% of all Scottish general medical practices) clinical record and practice administration software in Scottish General medical Practices. Originally BASIC based, Gpass was redeveloped in UNIX and then moved in the mid 1990's as NewGPASS onto a Windows platform. It is currently at version 5.7. An additional interface, GPASS Clinical, is in active development.

Its development has often been criticised as sluggish and lagging behind other more sophisticated systems like EMIS and Vision. Many of its supporters though cite its public ownership as a positivum.

In Spring 2006 a decision was reached by the Scottish GP representatives (the British Medical Association's Scottish LMC conference) to call for immediate abandonement of any further development as the software was hopelessly out of date and "not fit for purpose". The Scottish Executive dismissed in a report to parliament some of these complaints as secondary to inadequate hardware rather than inherent problems within the software.

In November 2006 a report to the Scottish Executive from Deloitte on General Practice Information Technology Options recommended a move to commercial alternatives. However, the report noted that currently available commercial systems were no more suitable for purpose than GPASS. Further, it was noted that no single supplier of clinical database systems is likely to be able to meet the requirements of the Scottish Executive as at the time of the report's publication.