Patient Level Information and Costing System management information

PLICS data contain detailed costs for NHS providers in England of: 

• Inpatient admissions
• Outpatient appointments
• Emergency care attendances
• Mental health provider spells and care contacts
• IAPT appointments
• Ambulance incidents going through 999 call centres or dispatch centres within England
• Community services care contacts

This costing activity is linked to existing national datasets, where possible, such as Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) and the Mental Health Services Data Set (MHSDS) to provide greater insights beyond the reported costs.

The PLICS data sets incorporate information collected as part of the PLICS Mandatory Collections which NHS Digital collects at the request of NHS England to support the aims of its Costing Transformation Programme (CTP). This same data can be used for non-clinical purposes, such as research and planning health services, and is published to be made widely available to commissioners, providers, and clinicians as well as service users and the public (to inform choice).

These analyses are published as 'management information' to provide information about the contents and quality of the data collected as part of the PLICS data collection. This includes provider-level data quality information to help users, including providers and clinicians, understand the impact of local data quality issues.

The term 'management information' describes aggregate information collated and used in the normal course of business to inform operational delivery, policy development or the management of organisational performance. The data may be incomplete in places, is not quality assured to the same extent as other official statistics and may not necessarily be fully representative.

The purpose of publishing these analyses is to raise awareness of the quality of the data submitted as part of the PLICS data collection and to help improve the data quality by making this information available in an open and accessible format.

The scope and nature of the data collected by the PLICS Mandatory collection continues to evolve as NHS England’s strategic objective of a single national cost collection is realised.

As part of this process, our understanding of the submitted data and possible data quality issues impacting its use continues to grow. Feeding back this insight to help both improve our use and understanding of the data already submitted to help its application and interpretation is crucial.

The following analytical outputs have been produced to support this process, working in partnership with NHS England colleagues to compliment and support other existing data quality outputs such as those utilised as part of the collection process.

The Patient Level Information and Costing System (PLICS) data collection has been designed to link to existing activity datasets. This use of data linkage is intended to limit the burden on submitting providers by minimising the number of PLICS data items collected and to ensure that a single version of activity information is used.     

The linkage rates between PLICS and the HES, MHSDS, IAPT and CSDS activity datasets are published at provider level to inform users and aid interpretation of PLICS data. This analysis provides a summary of the rate of linkage from PLICS to existing activity datasets to support efforts to highlight areas of improvement for provider level data reporting of key linkage fields in future PLICS submissions.

This analysis is provided to support understanding and improve linkage rates. The analysis summarises identifier values in the PLICS mental health, IAPT and CSCC feeds and the corresponding linked external data collections in order to highlight reasons why linkage rates may be reduced.

There are fields collected within PLICS that are also collected in national datasets that PLICS links to. We want to minimise the burden of data collection by reducing duplicate collection of fields. We must ensure the same information is being recorded in PLICS and any equivalent fields in other datasets before a PLICS field can be removed from future collections.  

Treatment Function Code (TFC) is an example of a field collected in the PLICS APC feed that has an equivalent field (TRETSPEF) in the Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) data set. It is expected that these two fields for an episode linked to HES should be the same. This dashboard has been developed to help identify areas where this may not be the case. It provides an insight to how many episodes have matching TFCs in PLICS and HES with breakdowns into both specific TFCs and provider-level data quality statistics to support local interpretation and data quality discussions.

We want to help you get the maximum benefit and insight from the PLICS data we collect, whilst minimising the burden of data collection through duplication. To do this, we seek to routinely link PLICS to several existing national datasets such as the Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) data.

Our ability to do so can be affected by the data quality of a number of submitted data fields including Commissioning Data Set  unique identifier, NHS number, date of birth and gender. To help you understand both the limitations data quality issues place on the current data, and where such issues can be addressed in future collections, we have published the following data linkage dashboard. It provides a summary of the rate of linkage and includes provider-level data quality statistics to support local interpretation and data quality discussions.

Developing a greater understanding of the costs incurred across an entire patient pathway through analysis of PLICS data is a crucial area of interest to many users of the data. Such analyses are dependent on the quality of the provider-submitted PLICS extract matching Identifier (PLEMI).

The PLEMI is an identifier intended to enable data linkage across several crucial PLICS activity feed types from one organisation. NHS Digital, working with colleagues at NHS England, have undertaken analysis of PLEMI linkage rates in the specialised ward care and supplementary information data feeds in PLICS which are published as 'management information'. This includes provider-level data quality statistics to support local interpretation and data quality discussions around PLICS data. 

The PLICS data assets are curated to optimise their use for analytical interrogation and support implementation of principles such as data minimisation.

The PLICS Data Dictionary provides detailed information on how this is achieved, outlining the fields from the admitted patient, outpatient, emergency care, specialised ward care, supplementary information, ambulance, and mental health data sets that are collected and used in PLICS. These include those data submitted directly by the data providers and fields we derive and add to the data sets in the analytical assets.

If you have any further queries in relation to PLICS analysis presented here or in the publication, please email: [email protected].