Professor Helen Lester, deputy director of the National Primary Care Research and Development Centre, which is developing indicators, said 30 practices were operating pilots.
At the Primary Care Live conference last week, she told GP the pilots would produce more cost-effective, robust and reliable indicators, and urged GPs to submit their own ideas to NICE.
Commenting on the latest QOF scores, Professor Lester said low scores for depression could be down to high levels of exception reporting and the stigma around depression.
'GPs are less comfortable talking about depression than heart disease or asthma. There has been a lot of anecdotal evidence that GPs do not like using the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 for diagnosing depression.'
