Part of The HES processing cycle and data quality checks

Data collections and frequency

Monthly provisional data

Since April 2008, HES extracts have been taken from SUS every month, representing a series of fixed positions aligned to extracted data, unlike SUS which is continuously updated whenever data is submitted. This is why there can be differences between SUS and HES even when looking at the same time period.

Each extract is cumulative and contains data submitted for the financial year so far, so Month 1 will only contain the data submitted with an activity date in April, but for Month 6 all the data with an activity date from April to September will be refreshed to reflect the latest submission for every record. One of the reasons for this is that additional data may be needed to update patient records from earlier in the year, for example an episode may potentially run for several months or an amendment may need to be made as clinical coding takes place on discharge.

In April 2021 HES processing was moved from Oracle to AHAS. From this time, the cumulative data is updated slightly differently, for example, for Month 6 only the records submitted or re-submitted since Month 5 will be updated. Having said this there are some key fields that are updated all the way back to April, as a year to date refresh especially for those fields that are derived using reference data to maintain consistent derivation results through out that period.

NHS Digital publishes provisional monthly HES and ECDS publications approximately six weeks after the reference period.

Find out more about the submission timetable for providers.

ARTICLE

Payment by Results guidance

SUS PbR guidance is a reference resource designed to support SUS users with regard to National Tariff/Payment by Results and it's implementation in SUS. For general SUS user guidance on sending and accessing data, set-up help and system support please refer to the SUS Guidance page.

Annual refresh / final year data

Each final year data publication of HES (and ECDS from 2020-21) collects and holds data based on a financial year. At the end of each year, after the 12 monthly submissions, there is an additional submission date to support what is called the Annual Refresh. This gives providers the opportunity to revise and update their submissions for the year.

A provisional extract is generated from the Annual Refresh submission and is referred to as the “Month 13” extract. This allows HES users an early provisional view of the final Year data before final publication.

While data relating to episodes and spells for a particular year can be amended and updated in SUS long after the year has passed, no further SUS updates are applied to HES which is fixed after Final Year data publication.

The production of the underlying annual data sets takes a few months after the reference period. The final submission deadline for NHS providers to send annual data to SUS is normally at the end of May, almost two months after that year has finished. It then takes approximately two months to produce the final data set and a further month to complete publication production, usually during September time.

Daily provisional data

Provisional HES and ECDS data are processed on a daily basis, but no data cleaning is applied to this provisional data.

Providers are required to submit ECDS data daily, and the number of providers doing this is increasing each month. There is no requirement for providers to submit APC or OP data daily and as such, even though the data is available on a daily basis, the coverage for the last 2 to 3 weeks is very low.

Last edited: 7 December 2021 9:35 am

Data collections and frequency

Monthly provisional data

Annual refresh / final year data

Daily provisional data

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