About PRIMIS

PRIMIS was set up in 2000 when our primary focus was on supporting general practitioners and their teams to engage with IT and embrace the use of electronic health records. Much of this work involved identifying the barriers and facilitators to implementing quality electronic health records and helping clinicians to understand how IT could be used as part of their process of patient care, rather than a separate entity.

Twenty years later and, following this early work on improved data quality and sufficiency, it is now possible for organisations like PRIMIS to produce tools that help practices develop a systematic approach to the identification, diagnosis and optimal management of patients with life-long conditions. Many of our tools are used on a regular basis in general practice and have gained endorsement from national NHS organisations.  

We have delivered NHS sponsored services to primary care organisations that have:

• enabled skills development in the use of electronic health records and have led to the improved quality of data held in the patient records, including the development and implementation of data quality indicators used in 97% of general practices in England. 

• produced sustained reductions in prescribing errors found in primary care in 41% of general practices in England and trained over 2,250 health care professionals in quality improvement tools and techniques.

Our technical experts are at the very vanguard of data specification development, authoring many of the data specifications that support national data collection activities. With the advent of SNOMED CT, our technical experts have been defining new approaches to the development of clinical code clusters, ensuring that data extraction, reporting and messaging services in primary care remain accurate and relevant. 

We have also worked on several high-profile clinical research programmes involving the use of primary care data to enable research discoveries that can save and improve people’s lives. 

PRIMIS is a specialist team of health informaticians within the School of Medicine at the University of Nottingham. PRIMIS operates a fully cost recovered service.