The processing cycle and HES data quality

Automatic data cleaning and derivation rules documentation and the HES Patient ID sections have been removed from this page. Information on data cleaning and derivations can now be found in the HES Technical Output Specification found on the HES Data Dictionary.

For activity occurring from April 2021, the patient identifier in HES will change from HESID to the Master Person Service (MPS) person Identifier (MPS Person ID). This change will take effect from the April to July 2021 year to date provisional HES data release in September 2021 and will be applied to all previous years of HES data .The MPS Person ID will be the biggest change to HES and is part of a wider strategy to move to a common patient identifier across all national patient level data sets.

A detailed analysis of the changes to HES and how this impacts data and statistics can be found in the methodological change paper and associated data tables accompanying this.

Learn more about Emergency Care Data Quality at the data quality information and reports on the Emergency Care Data Set (ECDS).

Healthcare providers collect administrative and clinical data locally to support the care of the patient. The data is submitted to the Secondary Uses Service (SUS).

At pre-arranged dates during the year, SUS consolidates those submissions and compiles the data as HES. It is then validated and cleansed, before deriving new items and making the information available in a database. Data quality reports and checks are completed at various stages in the cleansing and processing cycle.

This interactive report provides a summary of high level counts of the extracts taken from SUS+. The first page gives a breakdown of number of records extracted by data set - Accident and Emergency (AE), Outpatient (OP) and Admitted Patient Care (APC) - and by organisation number and type (NHS and independent providers). The second page shows the number of records deleted from the SUS extract and the reason for the deletion. These removed records will not appear on the final HES data set. The third page offers some notes to clarify concepts or atypical trends.  

Learn more about data quality checks performed on SUS and HES data. 

Latest activity period: January 2023

Latest publication date: 9 March 2023

NHS Digital routinely collects data from hospital providers regarding a patient's time at hospital as part of the Commissioning Data Set (CDS). This is then processed and is returned to healthcare providers as the Secondary Uses Service (SUS) data set and is used by the NHS for operational purposes.

Most NHS hospital trusts submit data on a monthly basis by deadline following a two-phase reconciliation process to arrive at a final agreed position for each month's activity defined in the NHS Standard Contract for payment purposes. This data is consolidated, validated and cleaned and then used to create the Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) data set which is released on a monthly basis as official statistics.