Registering with QMAS

Before any reports are run, you first need to register with QMAS. In England and Scotland, this can be done electronically from within Clinical Audit. Practices in Wales and Northern Ireland cannot register with QMAS from within Vision 3.

Before registering, you need the go-ahead from your Health Board:

• Your practice's National Identifier must be entered in Control Panel , File Maintenance - Practice.
  • You can look this code up on the NACS website. It is 6 characters - 1 alpha followed by 5 numbers (and often forms part of your practice's NHSNet email address).
  • Scotland only - The message transport in Scotland is eSMTP instead of MESH. Before registering with QMAS you must check your Practice Identifier, QMAS registration fails unless your Practice Identifier code is edited to exclude the initial letter S, for example, if your code is S12345, edit it to 12345. This Practice Identifier code should be edited from Control Panel , File Maintenance – Practice Details.
  • Northern Ireland only - Practices are implementing QOF reporting in conjunction with software supplied by MSD, and do not use Vision 3 to register with QMAS. For Northern Ireland sites with GPC, the QOF Reports are automatically generated at month end, as for England. The results can be viewed using View Results from the QOF Reporting tab, but the report is not submitted electronically.

To register with QMAS:

1. From Clinical Audit , select the QOF Reporting tab and then select Register.
2. A message is sent to QMAS automatically when the next Mail Gateway session is run.

• Clinical Audit - Register is disabled, and 'Registration has been requested' displays.
• Mail Gateway - Displays 'GMS Registration pending approval - the QOF Report will not be run until registration is acknowledged':

If Registration is successful ...

• QMAS send an acknowledgement and Registration has been approved displays on the QOF Reporting tab in Clinical Audit .
• QMAS then recognises that the practice has never submitted a nGMS contract report, and catch-up reports are generated from April to the end of the previous month, so, for example, if September registration, then from April to the end of August. These are submitted to QMAS on the next Mail Gateway session.
• The QOF Report will be run monthly displays.
• The Report will not be generated during the following times: These times are set up from GP Communicator , select Tools - Options, see Use Polling Interval, in order to avoid clashing with any scheduled tasks.
• Last run for: This shows the month that the QMAS reports were last run and submitted (or Last Run Never if no run has been made).

If Registration is unsuccessful...

It is possible that due to various factors, registration to QMAS is not successful:

• There may be a message to say that registration has been rejected.
• There is an error message in GPC.
• The Mail Gateway says Last run never under QOF Report.
• There may be some practices who are not allowed to register (e.g. some locum practices). These receive a Disallowed Submission Source error.
• For one reason or another, it may be possible that some practices are not known to QMAS. These practices receive an Unknown Submission Source error.
• Any other error messages should be referred to Help Line.