GPUK.net FAQ

FAQ	GPUK.net
Search this Site		GPUK.net Frequently Asked Questions What is GPUK.net? Security, Confidentiality, Privacy The Online Appointment Booking System Repeat Prescriptions New Patient Registration Reliability Signing up Free for an Account Mailing List Your Website Options Automated Homepages Website names .nhs.uk domain name registration Can I receive email at my .nhs.uk address? Using and Linking to the GPUK.net special facilities FrontPage Extensions Forgotten your Password? What about Branch Surgeries? Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland What about Nurses? What about other professions and trades? What Number do I Dial? Forthcoming, ToDo list Please also see the Help Screens for more information on managing GPUK.net What is GPUK.net? The Services Page describes the several services and facilities available to you on GPUK.net Security, Confidentiality, Privacy As a system designed for GP practices, by a British GP with an interest in computer security, security confidentiality and privacy are paramount in the design. Note that the system is not connected in any way to your own practice computer, other than by sending an email to it, and so there is absolutely no possibility of users being able to access your records at the surgery. This is not even an ordinary email, and so it is impossible for users to send you virus infected messages from the appointment and repeat prescription systems. In response to appointments selected by mouse clicks the system generates a simple plain text email to send details to the practice - the user cannot insert any messages or files into this email. Similarly for the repeat prescription and new patient registration systems - the user cannot insert any messages or files into this email, they can only send a few words of text using the proformas to guide them to fill in name, phone number, etc. Data submitted by the patient is protected by SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) and Strong Public Key encryption technology e.g. GnuPG, OpenPGP, or PGP. If you wish, you are able to hide your email address from your patients even though the system is sending messages to you from the website. This is perhaps particularly useful when you are starting to use the system, and you only want to receive structured messages from the system and not standard email correspondence from your patients. Read our Privacy Notice which is our notice to patients on the handling of the data that they submit to the website. Your website also includes a similar notice, but you may edit the text to suit your practice circumstances. The only data that we do keep is not patient data but the data submitted by you on signup (names, addresses, etc) and details of your account status (payments, activity, etc). We do not and shall not pass on your details (except as required by law) e.g. we shall not sell lists to other organisations for their mailing lists and such like, and we ourselves shall only send you information about our GPUK.net services and we shall not be advertising on behalf of other parties except where their services are of direct relevance to your site e.g. third-party products which work well with GPUK.net services. This is an advert free zone, except for if we want to tell you about any changes in our services. Whilst perhaps your fees could be a little lower if we accepted advertising and put banners over all your webpages, we think that the majority of our users would not want that and we prefer to keep a clean professional appearance for GPUK.net and your websites. The Online Appointment Booking System This service is unique to GPUK.net. (Please advise us if you know otherwise). Whilst you can purchase an appointments module as part of an expensive bespoke web design and hosting service, we offer our online appointments booking module at low cost to all UK GP's whether or not they host their websites with us. This module saves money for the practice (by enabling patients to make appointments when the surgery is closed you may save out of hours workload and costs). It is a convenience for the patient. Note that to use this system requires no technical abilities or special facilities. It doesn't even require a computerised appointment system at the practice since it works just as well with a paper based appointment system. Guaranteed to work with any appointment system, whether computerised or paper based. It does require a working system to receive email at the practice, either NHSnet or a standard internet connection will do fine. To find out about the system, read the full description of the system and try out the fully working demo. Even better, create yourself your own free account at the signup page and try it out. To see the configuration options for the system and see how you can match it to your practice, read the configuration help screens which explain all the details. Repeat Prescriptions Enabling Repeat Prescription ordering from a website is relatively straightforward, either by inviting email requests or by providing a simple form on a webpage. We go one step further. We provide a form, but we don't just simply send the data to the practice. The data submitted are validated in several aspects, and the patient is asked to correct unclear parts. This cannot be foolproof, but it lessens the chances of e.g. your receiving prescription requests with no patient details supplied. Our system gives the patient the option of whether or not to supply their email address to receive an email confirmation, and it gives the practice the option to password protect the ordering system in case of hoax ordering. New Patient Registration You will need to collect a patient signature to confirm online registration, but you can collect details online and then prepare a form for the patient to sign, either when you see them or perhaps better you could post the completed form to them asking them to sign and return it. Our form asks all the required questions, and you can set it to hide the dispensing questions if you are not a dispensing practice. Reliability GPUK.net, and any websites that you have here, are hosted at a major Data Center in Pittsburgh USA. Why Pittsburgh? This is a well established hosting service with careful protection and fall back facilities. Read the details, if you like, at www.pair.com/pair/facilities/. This not only provides a secure hosting service for your website, it also provides additional facilities needed for .nhs.uk website name registration, and space for expansion of GPUK.net as the service grows without any need for relocation which could disrupt your website. The most reliable service possible will still experience failure occasionally. Our hosting service backup the servers daily, so the most you are likely to lose in case of hardware failure are the current day's updates to your website. In any case you will be keeping backups yourself of any files that you upload, even if this simply amounts to leaving the files on your hard disk after editing them! You should be aware of one possible area of difficulty in the event of hardware failure and restore from backup. If you use the appointment booking system then appointments are automatically deleted from the database as they are used up. In the event of a failure of the database server and restore from backup appointments that have been booked may be re-offered again. This is clearly unwelcome and could lead to double bookings but you should appreciate that this would most likely affect only bookings that were made in a period of a few hours between the last backup and the hardware failure, and that failure such as this is a rare event - system uptime is over 99.9%, and what is more most periods of downtime will not require a restore from backup. If we are able to do so we shall email you to alert you of any information we have about such failures affecting our servers so that you are forewarned. Realistically, whilst we feel that we should declare this potential difficulty it is probably unlikely to actually occur more than once in several years usage of the system. Signing up Free for an Account Simply fill in a single page form which collects simple data such as your practice address and doctors names. This will take less than five minutes and your practice website will be set up immediately by us without any further work by you. There is no cost and no obligation. If you like what you see (and you have two months to review it and experiment with the setup before we ask you to pay up) then we levy a small annual charge to maintain the service. This charge will cover all usage and maintenance upgrades. See the rates for current charges which currently includes introductory offers. Mailling List Subscribe to the GPUK-users mailing list by going to: www.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/gpuk-users You can use this to discuss with other users how they are using the system and give and receive advice. More information about the mailing list on the Tips Page. Your Website Options Let's first explain the basics of how things are set up here, then we can explain the specific options later. Signing up with GPUK.net immediately creates for you a website with the address www.gpuk.net/namechosenbyyou This website is not just a name with a blank screen, we immediately create for you and put there a home page, a links page, a contact page, and links to the appointment, repeat prescription, new patient registration, and patient name/address change screens, and other pages such as a news page and practice picture gallery. If you don't want to use all of these you can remove them, and if you want more then you can create extra pages and edit the contents without needing any technical skills. Thereafter you have many choices and options and so it may seem to get complicated. We'll break it down here into categories, starting with the simpler situation and leading to the fully featured options later. We refer to Automated Pages, which are those website features which you can control and update without any specialist knowledge at all. As long as you can click a mouse you can alter the style, content, and appearance of your website and the features linked from it. We refer to Customised Websites, which is when you upload pages that you have written yourself (or had written for you by a web designer). You don't have to use our designs, you can simply upload your own pages. We also discuss possibilities for changing address of your website, notably to register free a .nhs.uk name such as www.yourpracticename.nhs.uk for your practice website, but note that this is entirely optional, you can stay with the name www.gpuk.net/yourpracticename if you prefer. In fact you can have both! Finally there are the special features available on GPUK.net, and we discuss how you can activate or disable these, and how you can use them whether your website is hosted with us or whether you wish to keep your existing website elsewhere and link to the facilities here. Automated Pages If you want a practice website, but don't want the fuss and expense of setting one up, then this is for you. By answering the questions on just one screen taking two to three minutes, giving such answers as the names of your doctors and the address of your surgery, you can sign up (free) and we create for you some pages using that information. Immediately you can view them and review them, and using the redesign features that we provide (e.g. click to select a new background colour or texture from several offered to you, or click to remove the link to new patient registrations if you do not wish to offer that feature) you can amend this initial design if you wish. We are adding to the range of styles and designs which you can select with mouse clicks - really no technical knowledge required at all. If practice details change e.g. change of partners or phone numbers, you can easily also update that information on your website. You can also type in paragraphs of text of your own if you wish, again without your needing to have any knowledge of web page coding. Everyone starts with an Automated Pages (they're created for you the moment that you sign up) but you have the option either immediately or later to make more radical changes - you can have a fully customised website. Customised Websites Maybe you have some knowledge of web page coding, or have someone to do it for you, and you're not satisfied with our designs or you want to make greater changes. No problem, we provide uploading facilities for you to upload html and image files that you have created, so that you can overwrite the pages that we placed there when creating your account. So now you have full control over the style and content of your website. If you don't have the skills but want a fully featured professionally designed site we can put you in touch with professional web designers who can tailor their design to our facilities. What's the big deal you ask, you could do that with any ISP's webspace. True, and if that's all you want to do then there isn't a great advantage to you in placing your pages at GPUK.net. But by using our site you have the best opportunity to use our additional services (online appointments, repeat prescriptions, new patient registration), in a way that is better integrated with your pages. And you also have the opportunity to register an .nhs.uk name for your site. Website names With a short domain name like GPUK.net, a website name such as www.gpuk.net/yoursurgery is quite acceptable and there is no need to do anything further unless you wish it. .nhs.uk Domain Names For those who wish it we have all the required facilities (and help you with the paperwork) to enable you to register free names such as www.yoursurgery.nhs.uk. There is no charge for registration - see NHS.UK registration help page for details on how to set this up. All it involves is filling in a simple form (we provide guidance on that) and faxing it to the NHS Information Authority, and then telling us the name that you have chosen. If your surgery name is a common one, then make sure that you get in first! Very few surgeries have registered .nhs.uk names yet, but the common names will go first. Do you really want to be left with having to accept www.surgery83.nhs.uk, like some people's Hotmail email address?! Can I receive email at my .nhs.uk address? Currently the NHSIA do not allow any form of email address for GP practices other than name@practicecode.nhs.uk, so the answer is, sorry to say, no. However, there are two options here to fill this gap. You can create additional automated pages for your website, and these have an option to include a web-to-email form. So if you set up one of these then your patients may email the surgery without even knowing your email address! You could purchase a more friendly domain name with mail forwarding included e.g. from www.clicknames.net and give that address to your patients. This would hide your unfriendly name@practicecode.nhs.uk email address, and then you arrange with Clicknames for email to your domain name to be forwarded to your practice email address. Other Domain Names You may already have a name registered elsewhere. If you want to move your website to GPUK.net then most likely you can transfer that name here (but check the small print of your contract there, in some circumstances you may have to pay to transfer your name). If you use a service such as www.clicknames.net then you can easily for free transfer the name yourself so as to connect to your GPUK.net website, by using their web page form. You can have two or more names on one site! You can register an .nhs.uk name at GPUK.net, and also transfer your previous name to your GPUK.net website. Now you can publicise the new .nhs.uk name, but any patients who have made a note of the old name will still be able to find your site by using the old name. Using and Linking to the GPUK.net special facilities The most special of our features is the Online Appointment Booking system, and even if you have a website elsewhere already you may wish to make use of this and our other services. You may use any of our features whether or not you host your website at GPUK.net, and whether you use Automated Pages or a fully Customised Website. If you use Automated Pages then these features are automatically linked to your site. They are initially set up in demo mode so nobody will use them accidentally, but you can also remove the links to them (using the easy configuration screen) if you don't want them showing at all. If you use a Customised Website you will need to include links to just four pages, the appointments booking screen, the repeat prescription ordering screen, and the registration details pages. You can apply your stylesheet to our pages to blend them in with your design. We shall be able to offer alternative designs for these screens so let us know your requirements. These are the names that you need to link. We don't guarantee not to change these, but we have no plans to do so. www.gpuk.net/yoursurgery/appointments/ or www.yoursurgery.nhs.uk/appointments/ www.gpuk.net/yoursurgery/prescriptions/ or www.yoursurgery.nhs.uk/prescriptions/ www.gpuk.net/yoursurgery/register/ or www.yoursurgery.nhs.uk/register/ www.gpuk.net/yoursurgery/newaddress/ or www.yoursurgery.nhs.uk/newaddress/ If your site is elsewhere but you want to use our facilities, just signup here anyway, but don't advertise your GPUK.net website address to your patients. Just link to the pages mentioned above. If you wish the features to blend in with your existing site you may link to special versions of these features which are designed to be displayed within a frame on your own site: www.gpuk.net/yoursurgery/fappoint.php3 or www.yoursurgery.nhs.uk/fappoint.php3 www.gpuk.net/yoursurgery/frepeats.php3 or www.yoursurgery.nhs.uk/frepeats.php3 www.gpuk.net/yoursurgery/fregister.php3 or www.yoursurgery.nhs.uk/fregister.php3 www.gpuk.net/yoursurgery/fnewaddress.php3 or www.yoursurgery.nhs.uk/fnewaddress.php3 These pages designed especially for linking via frames do not include any menu or frame or footer, and so will appear as part of your website, and you can adjust the appearance to blend with your site by editing the stylesheet. The final option is that you ask us to produce a customised version of the page(s) to blend with your current website. This may or may not be technically possible, depending on your current design, and the charge will reflect the work involved. Email enquiry@gpuk.net giving the URL for your current website, to ask for a quotation. For an example of such integration with an existing design see "one that we prepared earlier" ;-) FrontPage Extensions For security reasons we cannot offer use of Frontpage Extensions if you have a standard account. However: If you wish you may still edit your pages using FrontPage as your html editor. We can offer free of charge alternatives to such Frontpage features as hit counters, site search, etc. Let us know what functions you wish us to provide. We can arrange for you to use FrontPage Extensions by setting up a separate new account for you at additional charge - please enquire. Lost Password If you have lost your password or Admin Codename, please click the "Lost Password" button on the "alternative" Admin Index page and your password and other account details will be emailed to your registered admin email address. To access the alternative admin page, instead of http://www.gpuk.net/youraccount/admin/ go to http://www.gpuk.net/youraccount/admin2/ (note the use of admin2 in place of admin). These alternative pages, an older version of the admin menu, do not require a password to gain access, instead a password is required when actually using the admin functions. If your admin email address is non-functional then you will not be able to receive the details. If you really cannot remember your password and also cannot access your registered email account then email support@gpuk.net to explain the circumstances. We may be prepared to update your password and email address for you but we shall need proof of your identity. Please try to avoid this occurrence by always ensuring that if you change ISP (or for some other reason can no longer use the email account that you registered with us) you also update the email address that you have registered with us. What about Branch Surgeries? The systems of GPUK.net websites can accommodate branch surgeries. See the Tips page. Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland The author is an English GP, so apologies for the terms used here which are not appropriate for other places! If anything needs updating for national/regional variations e.g. registration form details, terminology, etc send us details and we shall try to incorporate all appropriate changes. What about Nurses? The system may be used for nurse appointments as for doctors. Simply include the nurses' names along with the doctor details either when first signing up or when subsequently using the configuration screens to update the staff details. Since nurses may have more need for variable appointment lengths, and the appointment system will not give you the reasons why a patient is making the booking, e.g. a quick visit for a single tetanus booster or a longer visit for a complex dressing, you need to consider this first. For this reason the text on the booking screen initially states that the system is not for nurse appointments, but if you wish to use your system for nurses then you can do so, just be sure to use the Appointments configuration screen to edit that paragraph to give more specific instructions to patients when making bookings, and then use the Doctor/Nurse Details Update page to enable their appointments display. What about other Professions and Trades? The initial version of this software has been produced specifically for UK GP practice websites and appointments, but it can easily be used by many other professions and trades both for websites and for appointments. We shall be producing other products tailored for other circumstances - if you are interested in using this concept for your profession or trade then simply email suggestion@gpuk.net. We shall prioritise development of other products according to the interest, so let us know if you are interested! What Number do I Dial? GPUK.net is not a dial-up ISP, and you cannot dial into us. To access your website you need to already have an internet connection, either at home or at the practice or both, preferably at the practice at least. You can use an NHSnet connection, or one of the very many dial up ISP's, e.g. Freeserve, Demon, etc etc. We provide website services for UK GP's - easy set up of a website, and provision for .nhs.uk domain name registration, and advanced features such as online appointment bookings, repeat prescriptions, patient registration details, etc. Forthcoming, ToDo list As we receive your questions we shall add more topics to this FAQ and to the help screens. We can add additional styles and layouts of automated website designs, to be selected from the Style Selection menu. Please advise us as to your preferred styles - plain? fancy? bright? - please guide us as to which to prioritise. We can offer different styles and types of interactive pages. e.g. The appointments listing could be several small pages instead of one long scrolling page. The messages to the practice confirming appointments and prescriptions could be in XML if required so as to integrate with the receiving system. We already offer the option of full webpages or systems to run within a frame, and we could offer other options such as WAP or WebTV compatible pages. Other improvements are scheduled. We shall listen to your requests - send them to us. If they are technically feasible and of benefit to other users then we shall try to incorporate them as a free upgrade to all. If you require changes specific to your circumstances, but not applicable to others, then we shall still try to provide them but this may be chargeable - send us your request and we shall advise you of the charge if any.


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