Cohorting as a Service (CaaS)

Cohorting as a Service (Caas) securely identifies groups of people (known as cohorts), using national health data.

We have successfully created digital cohorts for the NHS England Vaccination Digital Services team to support COVID-19 and Influenza campaigns. We’re also looking to extend the services we’ve developed into other NHS England programmes.

The service is an internal service used within NHS England.

We can provide tailored packages to support different use cases, including being able to produce regional and local cohorts.

We use a range of data sources including:

• demographic data (PDS)
• GP data (GPES)
• hospital data (HES)
• Systemic Anti-Cancer Therapy data (SACT)
• radiotherapy data (RTDS)

Caas produces cohorts for direct care purposes. This includes coordinated population health care as defined in the Information Governance Review (opens as PDF).

Contact the Data Access Request Service (DARS) or NHS DigiTrials to discuss the creation of cohorts which are not for direct care. 

You can find more information on why and how we process your data to support the vaccination programme on the NHS England national vaccination programmes page. 

We are developing:

• a data platform that quickly and securely identify patients for direct care cohorts
• a service that allows users to define, create and obtain approval for cohorts
• webpages that detail how cohorts were created by clinicians, including the specific rules and codes used
• an internal tool that will give users immediate access to information for responding to cohort enquiries

We’re in the process of creating a road map that will outline the plans for the future of our services.

These are the cohorts that the service has produced in the past for individual cases:

For information, email: [email protected].