NHS Digital Data Release Register

NHS Digital Data Release Register - reformatted

NHS North and East London Commissioning Support Unit

Opt outs honoured: N

Basis: Health and Social Care Act 2012

Format: Anonymised - ICO code compliant Non Sensitive

How often: Ongoing

When: unknown — 11/2016

HSCIC Id: DARS-NIC-371243-H1P5T-v0.1

Data: Hospital Episode Statistics Accident and Emergency

Data: Hospital Episode Statistics Admitted Patient Care

Data: Hospital Episode Statistics Critical Care

Data: Hospital Episode Statistics Outpatients

Data: Diagnostic Imaging Dataset

Output: Outputs are on an on going basis (i.e., no target date) as the HES data in general is used to support general commissioning and public health needs, and is not aimed at a specific report or deadline for use.

All outputs informed by information retrieved from the HES data tables are governed by adherence to the HES guidance on suppression of small numbers. Users of the data abide by the HES Analysis Guide which means that all outputs released must be aggregated with small numbers suppressed.

HES allows NELCSU to provide intelligence for programmes whose scope demands activity benchmarking of the CSU's clients (CCGs) against similar health economies or populations in England. SUS data does not allow this scope. National data also supports NHS health economy wide transformation projects that require detailed and comprehensive hospital level data.

Commissioners can compare with any service known to have better outcomes or new pathways, or support large scale transformation projects that may impact several commissioners across, for example, the North London area.

Outputs expected are aggregated data to support reports or decisions across examples such as the following:
• Elements of Joint Strategic Needs Assessments (JSNA) - to support CCGs/Local Authorities to consider the needs of their local populations and in how they respond with effective commissioning of services to properly meet those needs, by enabling, for example views of the use of secondary services by different patient groups by condition, ethnicity, etc.
• Quality, Innovation, Productivity and Prevention (QIPP) development - identifying and benchmarking areas across England with better practice than locally, to help evaluate high costs and poor outcomes in hospital care.
• Providing data on hospital admissions in-year to support monitoring of national ambitions, such as avoiding unnecessary admissions across CCGs, by practice, condition, hospital trust. CCGs are required to monitor and make progress on national outcome measures and ambitions by NHS England, and use of national benchmarking is promoted heavily by initiatives such as Right Care ‘Commissioning for Value’ (on behalf of NHSE). Without access to national data such as HES, CCGs cannot be ultimately certain that they are making progress or making decisions on the best basis possible.

Diagnostic Imaging is an acknowledged area of over/ duplicate treatment and so a fruitful area for NELCSU to investigate and to support improvement initiatives (eg Right Care). The DIDs data with linkage to HES will help with any deep dives and provide further opportunities for gaining insight from this data. As an example some of NELCSU customer CCGs have very high diagnostic intervention rates per head of population (eg for MRIs). Having DIDs data allows NELCSU to have the detailed data to be able to investigate these type of issues in more detail and provide useful outputs.

Activities: Only an approved list of NELCSU substantively employed analysts have access to the full set of pseudonymised data tables, via secure server based Structured Query Language (SQL) querying. The data will only be for the purposes described in this document and not for any other purposes, including being used in data tools.

CSU analysts interrogate the data to produce aggregated output for monitoring care outcome and activity for a CCG’s population, patient group, condition or service provider, including trends over time in any given activity or care process. For example, trends over time can be modelled to produce forecasts of future activity, taking into account population growth or changes in service configuration.

National data is necessary to benchmark against any CCG peer groups (as defined by NHS England), or any other care pathway or group of patients. Benchmarking allows an individual CCG to evaluate its own care processes and outcomes against other similar commissioning populations, with a view to identifying areas for improvement or to identify best practice. National data also supports NHS health economy wide transformation projects or other commissioning initiatives that require detailed and comprehensive hospital level data.

Analysts will only release aggregated data with small numbers suppressed in line with the HES Analysis Guide.

The data is being held within a data centre which also holds data on behalf of other organisations. The applicant agrees that the data under this agreement must be held and remain separate to all other data (except where explicitly stated within the agreement), and accepts full responsibility for the breach of this agreement should this not be the case. In order to mitigate this risk, it is strongly recommended that the applicant considers the best practice controls as detailed in ISO 27017:2015 Code of practice for information security controls based on ISO/IEC 27002 and ISO 27018:2014, which establish commonly accepted control objectives, controls and guidelines for implementing measures to protect Personally Identifiable Data.

For clarity, any access by Interxion to data held under this agreement would be considered a breach of the agreement. This includes granting of access to the database[s] containing the data.

Objective: The HES data will only be used by North and East London Commissioning Support Unit (NELCSU) to provide support to Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) and other commissioning bodies working with NELCSU to meet their statutory duties under the Health & Social Care Act 2012 and NHS health economy wide transformation projects that require detailed hospital level data.

The pseudonymised record level HES data is interrogated only by approved NELCSU substantively employed analysts to provide benchmarking and comparative information to NELCSU clients and NHS health economy wide transformation projects that require detailed hospital level data.

The full, national set of HES data allows complex and detailed modelling and benchmarking of activity, essential to successful commissioning of services and contract monitoring, including analysing relationships and influences between A&E, Inpatient and outpatient care. This will especially support benchmarking work for CCG clients taking part in health economy wide transformation projects that require detailed and comprehensive hospital level data (for example from local SUS data feeds the applicant only receives data for their CCG’s registered population, which does not allow whole trust activity to be considered) and allow CCGs to benchmark and identify best practice in similar health economies anywhere in England.

All outputs will contain only data that is aggregated with small numbers suppressed in line with the HES Analysis Guide.

Benefits: CCGs and Local Authorities (Public Health teams) have joint statutory duties under the Health and Social Care Act 2012 to plan and commission services and jointly assess the needs of their patients and populations, to ensure that health improvements and better outcomes are measurable, identifiable and attainable.

Analysis of HES and DIDs data helps these organisations achieve this by providing the greatest scope to evaluate outcomes of care and improvement in their health services against peer groups and national achievement – providing a more extensive and complete base of knowledge for decision making than data on their own patients alone (SUS data).

Measurable benefits can occur, for example, through gradual improvement in outcome over a number of years, to more immediate commissioning new services where a gap is identified, or de-commissioning failing services by identifying lower outcomes than is acceptable, compared to the norm.

Examples of benefits achieved to date include:
a. NELCSU supported a major reconfiguration of cancer and cardiac services in North London. The detailed numbers to support the case for change were extracted from the raw HES data. This was a complex exercise, requiring clinical input to define the primary and secondary coding of the patient cohorts affected by the change. This would only be possible through using very granular data which covers whole hospital activity (rather than for our customer CCGs). The rigour of the work helped with forming realistic planning assumptions and obtaining clinical and provider buy in for changes.
b. NELCSU are currently supporting NHS England with work identifying the highest and lowest referrers within London by CCG and by GP Practices within each CCG. This work requires whole London data and as it adopts age and sex standardisation needs data to a very granular level. We have also applied certain filters that improve the accuracy of the benchmarking from detailed analysis of the data. This project is currently supporting NHS England in a London-wide demand management programme which aims to ease the pressure on acute hospitals by targeting those CCGs and practices with abnormally referral rates.

Source: NHS Digital.