01 April 2022
Dear colleague,
Update to General Direction 0005
I am writing to inform you that General Direction 0005 setting out the mandatory requirements for clinics on collecting, recording and submitting data to the HFEA Register of information has been amended.
The changes are made to support the implementation of PRISM, our new data submission system, which went live on 14th September 2021. From that date we have advised clinics of a deployment window, for both clinics submitting directly to PRISM or through a third-party system suppler (API solution).
On 29th November 2021, Rachel Cutting wrote to PRs that the deployment window would end on 31st March 2022 by which time the HFEA expected all clinics to be ‘deployed and caught up’ on PRISM.
General Direction 0005 (Version 5) will come into force on the 1st of April 2022 at the end of the deployment window for PRISM.
The main changes to the Direction in version 5 are:
- To change references that were previously related to the EDI the old submissions system, so they are now compatible with PRISM operations.
- To reflect the changes in our new data submission requirements we no longer refer to ‘forms’. Instead, we refer to ‘Information types’ detailed in the data dictionary, the purpose of each information type, and the deadline for submission.
- A reduction in the period allowed of correction of submission errors from 2 months to 4 weeks.
- A standardisation of submission deadlines so that they are with a sole exception always expressed in weeks.
- Simplification of some submission requirements to, for example, “before treatment”, “before use of donor gametes or embryos”
- We no longer refer to the person responsible signing off a hard copy of their CaFC data before publication as we expect that this will be done electronically via the Clinic Portal.
PRISM bedding in: With any new system, once deployment is complete and clinics are caught up on any submission backlog, there will be an ongoing period of bedding in and refinement for PRISM. During this time there may be instances where clinics are unable to submit specific elements of information because of system related issues. We keep clinics informed of such issues on the message board of the PRISM Homepage, to which all clinics have access.
If a clinic has records that are ‘on hold, awaiting submission’ then clinics must keep a detailed list of these, so that they can advise HFEA of the number and reasons for records being on hold, and clinics must then submit these to HFEA at the earliest opportunity once any system issues have been resolved.