Un-curated Low Latency Hospital Data Set for Emergency Care contains no derived fields bar a pseudonymised key for cohort linkage.
Two versions of the Admitted Patient Care, Critical Care, and Outpatient products will be made available
- package 1 version is the raw SUS data with none of the derived fields included
- package 2 version will include both the raw CDS data and a number of derived fields” or 'derivations'
The derivations have been generated by SUS following published derivation rules which are used to derive additional data items based on:
- data held on other national systems (Patient Demographic System, Organisation Data Service or Post Code data)
- nationally defined policy (Payment by Results, HRG Grouping and Commissioner Assignment Method)
No fields that are submitted to SUS by the hospital provider will be amended nor will any records be added or removed (for instance suspected duplicate records will not be removed).
Exceptions to this are legally restricted data whereby patient identifiers are stripped out if a provider sends them in error.
Derivations within this product that are produced utilising reference data are derived at the point of time of processing of that record and will not be subsequently updated within the financial year.
This means that there is a risk that derivations for records relating to identical activities on the same date may differ when queried due solely to when updated reference data available in the back end becomes available throughout the year.
The lag time of availability of such reference data may vary. This differs from HES data where data is rerun each month to ensure consistency across all records within the derived data against a consistent version of that reference data.