Pharmacies' NHS paymaster has set out plans to improve prescription pricing transparency in England within nine months.

The NHS Business Services Authority (BSA) aimed to give contractors access to an online portal that will display their account information by next summer, senior policy manager Michael Hamilton told the Avicenna conference in Birmingham on Sunday (October 20).

Ultimately, the NHS BSA would like to make scanned images of submitted prescriptions available to contractors, as in Wales, Mr Hamilton said. But he warned the challenges involved would probably see the work take until 2015 to complete.

"Providing transparent information is something I've been struggling with for two years now," Mr Hamilton told the conference. "I'm disappointed at how slow this has been and we're working on a business case to get this approved – it's in our business plan this year."

Throughout 2011 and 2012, C+D lobbied for accuracy and transparency in prescription payments with our Fight for Fairness campaign.

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	Mr Hamilton said he had personally endorsed a three-stage process to increasing transparency in prescription pricing. The first phase would be to create an online portal, while stage two would give contractors detailed information on each line item they were paid for, including price, fees and endorsements.

Phase three would make scanned images of prescriptions available, so contractors could resolve any queries about why an item had been switched from "unpaid" to "paid for". But Mr Hamilton warned that the sheer prescription volume in England meant it would have to make 170 million images available every month.

"Images are going to be hard for us to do – Wales does it, but it's smaller than a large PCT in England," he said. "We're also worried about... people hacking in and seeing your confidential information and patient information, so we'd have to make sure security was absolutely right."

Mr Hamilton pledged that the pricing authority would not "rest on its laurels" in improving payment accuracy.

The NHS BSA's latest accuracy figures, which analysed a random sample of 50,000 prescriptions processed in May, found there was 99.1 per cent accuracy in absolute cash variance. The measure looks at the sum of all errors made, as opposed to its formerly used measure of net cash variance, which took the difference between the over- and underpayment values.

The switch in accuracy measure came after C+D revealed in August 2011 that the NHS BSA made errors on almost 3 per cent of items despite reporting its accuracy as 99.8 per cent using net cash variance. Community pharmacy leaders branded the findings "shameful" and called on the paymaster to "get its act together".

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