Commissioner bulletin - December 2020

NHS Digital, alongside NHS England and Improvement and NHSX, is working closely with providers and Clinical Commissioning Groups to facilitate COVID Oximetry @home.  Collecting this data is crucial in allowing us to evaluate the service, particularly its impact on patient mortality and length of stay figures. A crucial part of the programme is a two-way flow of data.

NHS Digital from mid-December onwards will provide daily to providers and CCGs, details of patients who have tested positive in your area and whether they meet the recommended criteria for being onboarded onto Oximetry @home.

We need to collect a slim dataset from providers for the purposes of management information and evaluation of the programme. This has been kept as slim as possible to minimise admin burden on providers. We are working as swiftly as we can to complete the necessary work to enable this data collection.

New SNOMED clinical codes have been created for use by COVID Oximetry @home providers. 

The new codes have been provided to GP systems suppliers, who will be implementing them in their systems. Users of TPP SystmOne can already use these codes; we are continuing to work with other GP IT system suppliers. Access the full list of SNOMED clinical codes.

If you are part of a local team at a CCG, provider or supplier establishing a COVID Oximetry @Home pathway and have questions for NHS Digital please email [email protected].

SUS released the changes to support the new version of ECDS on 4 December 2020. Find details of the amendments included in the new ECDS schema.  

The changes that we made in SUS are both to enable providers to submit the new data and DSCROs to download the new data items. The extract formats are available on the PbR and the SUS+ web pages.  

We have not had any providers submit values in the new schema fields. Please contact your DSCRO to arrange for them to make the fields of interest available to you.

We have started flowing initial data to some DSCROs in the new unified extract format.  DSCROs are currently building landing and transformation processes to deal with the new JSONL format and we have transmitted data to some of them to enable them to test these new processes.

As DSCROs become confident in handling this new way of flowing data then we will switch to more frequent updates (daily or weekly). The translation of this new capability into new products and services for commissioners will be determined locally.

As a recap for the year, through 2020 the NHS Digital Data Management Service has developed processes to release monthly extracts to DSCROs for Births, Summary Hospital-level Mortality Indicator (SHMI) and Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) datasets. With a view to increase delivery in the New Year, the first datasets included in the workplan are the National Diabetes Audit (NDA) and NHS BSA Primary Care (Dispensed) Medicines datasets, as well as a release of historical Personal Demographics Service data.

We will continue to work with you to support our Clinically Extremely Vulnerable and anticipate that this will present various new challenges and opportunities to work in partnership.

The change to how we capture details of the customer Privacy Notice has been re-designed to make it quicker to process an application and minimize data capture requirements. It was agreed with IGARD and meets the standards required.  

When completing an application on DARS Online customers will be required to select ‘Yes’ when presented with the statement:

‘Please confirm that the data controller(s) listed within your application agree that they will ensure that a GDPR compliant, publicly accessible transparency notice relating to the data within the application will be maintained throughout the life of this agreement’.

Where ‘No’ is answered, the customer must provide details as to why this is the case in the free text field.

From the 18 December 2020, CRM will be updated so that when ‘Yes’ has been selected the agreed standard wording will display in the IGARD summary report in section 4.

The Faster SUS+ programme has been established with the task of ensuring all providers of NHS funded acute healthcare increase the frequency of submission of Commissioning Data Set (CDS) data to the Secondary Uses Service (SUS). This results in the frequency of submission moving from monthly submission to weekly, effective from the end of September 2020. The programme have developed a daily SUS+ submission monitoring report for inpatient data which monitors by provider and region the timeliness of the data held in SUS+. A similar report is being developed for outpatient data.

CCGs may now be interested in using these more frequent data submissions to support local planning and if you would like access to the data for your area please work with your CSU colleagues who will be able to assist with access and analysis of this data. Please note that the weekly submissions may not be fully coded, and the monthly data inclusion cycle remains unchanged.

Learn more about the programme and gain access to the daily SUS+ submission monitoring report. If you do not have access to NHS Futures, please email [email protected].

The majority of NHS Digital BAU activity will be paused between 21 December 2020 and 1 January 2021, except for urgent or critical programmes or services over this period, this is to allow staff to take some leave and take it fully as downtime.

From 19 December 2020, if you need help identifying the right person for urgent support contact the Live Services team on [email protected] or 0300 303 5035  

For further information on the above topics or to join the Data Services for Commissioners monthly Commissioning Forums, please email us at [email protected].

The next commissioning forum will be held on the 19 January 2021.