Question

What are the processes surrounding end of year submissions in Contract+?

Answer

This recaps the processes surrounding the end of year submissions to QMAS. When we refer to QMAS in this email, it means your central submissions system which might be QMAS in England, PCAS in Northern Ireland, or CM-Web in Wales.

Contract+ will generate the submission report on schedule and will initiate the transfer request using the DTS (Data Transmission Service) system in your clinical system. Once the file leaves Contract+, we have no way of tracking the delivery of that file.

Eventually, the file will be delivered to QMAS and it will be held in a queue. At some stage it will be taken from that queue and processed. Based on historic performance, this may be several days after the file was actually submitted to QMAS. After it has been processed, the QMAS website that you can log in to will be updated to show the results.

When the file is processed, if QMAS detects an error then it sends a message back to Contract+, otherwise it sends an "OK". Sometimes, QMAS will send an "Acknowledgement" which means that it recognizes that a file has been submitted, but that QMAS has not yet processed it from the queue. These status messages is NOT instantly delivered back to us, again it may take some hours or days to be received). When an error message is received, the submission is noted as having Errored in the Submission Manager.

Please note that CM-Web and PCAS do NOT send ANY messages back to Contract+; when the message is sent by Contract+ it is presumed to have been delivered and processed OK as there is no acknowledgement of any sort, and the Submission Manager will show your submissions as having been "Sent". However, it may take some days for the file to be processed by CM-Web or PCAS and for those sites to be updated with your latest submission.

So, after Contract+ has submitted a file to QMAS, it may take quite some days before the results show or the status changes in Submission Manager. If Contract+ does not receive a response from QMAS (in England) after a defined number of days, then it will resubmit the file automatically. However, QMAS always accepts the FIRST file that it receives, and ignores all subsequent submissions for the same date.

The ONLY situation which you need to raise with iSOFT (Contract+ is not responsible for QMAS submissions for other clinical systems) is when:

• You are in England and the Contract+ Submission Manager is showing an Error against a file submission

• You are in Wales or Northern Ireland and CM-Web or PCAS have not been updated with your results by around the 5th April

The actual statuses that can be displayed in the Contract+ Submission Manager for a report are:

• Scheduled: Submission has been scheduled to be run in the future, but is not yet due

• Pending: Submission will be generated the next time an analysis is performed

• Sent: Submission has been picked up by DTS to be sent to QMAS, CM-Web or PCAS. (In Wales and N.I. no more information will be available)

• Completed: File has been submitted to DTS, but DTS has not yet started the file transfer (after 4 hours of this status, Contract+ will indicate a "Probable DTS configuration error", contact iSOFT for advice and resolution)

• Awaiting Response: File has been sent by DTS to QMAS, but QMAS has not yet provided an acknowledgement back (QMAS in England only)

• Failed: No response from QMAS after 36 hours of submitting the file. New submission will be generated automatically with the next analysis.

• Error: Error report received back from QMAS, or no response from QMAS after 4 days. Contact iSOFT for support.

• Received: QMAS acknowledges receipt of the file submission, but has not yet processed it

• Confirmed: QMAS has processed the file submission and has confirmed results as OK. Results should appear on QMAS website within a few days.

You can review the status and history of the file submission by double clicking on an entry in the Submission Manager screen, and then clicking on the History tab. This shows details about the submission lifecycle history.

The key thing to bear in mind is that the process of submitting files to QMAS, having it process them and provide a response back to the practice, can take some considerable time. Contract+ handles these processes automatically and you only need to contact iSOFT for support when Contract+ indicates that a submission has Errored or has a probable DTS configuration error.

As an addendum to this, once the file has been scheduled by Contract+ to be sent by DTS, you can force the process of actually transferring the file to be initiated more frequently by following these steps:

To force any waiting messages to be sent before the next scheduled sent/receive time, on the iSoft Connect server right click on the TC icon in the system tray and click on 'Email only'. To check for acknowledgements being returned by QMAS, repeat this process at regular intervals to process any incoming messages, then refresh the Submission Manager view in Contract+ to see the current status