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NHS Digital

By Tom Foley.

In England, HES (Hospital Episode Statistics) data, collected by providers and collated by NHS Digital provides, demographic, diagnostic and intervention data for all inpatient episodes, along with very limited details of outpatient episodes and data on A&E attendances. Data is recorded through Patient Administrative Systems (PAS) at an individual provider level.  This includes administrative data such as patient demographic information, as well as diagnostic and procedure codes.  This is submitted to a data warehouse called Secondary Uses Service (SUS). Elements of this data then undergo cleaning and data quality checks before being published as HES data3. This data is standardised across providers, overcoming many of the interoperability issues4. Reliability of HES data can be an issue, because it is often entered by non-clinical coders who must interpret handwritten notes. The care.data project was due to add GP data to this collection, however, the project was scraped due to Information Governance concerns.

Website: http://content.digital.nhs.uk/hes