Service on a page SUS+

The Secondary Uses Service (SUS+) is the single, comprehensive repository for healthcare data in England which enables a range of reporting and analyses to support the NHS in the delivery of healthcare services since 2008.

SUS+ is a secure trusted data warehouse that stores this patient-level information in line with national standards and applies complex derivations which support national tariff policy and secondary analysis. 

Access to the SUS+ portal is managed using Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) which grants appropriate auditable access levels to identifiable, anonymised or pseudonymised data based on the users job role.

Submission to SUS+ is via Message Exchange for Social Care and Health (MESH) for Commissioning Dataset (CDS) XML interchanges.

SUS+ is monitored by the Cyber Security Operations Centre (CSOC) and complies with all Information Governance directives, especially in terms of processing and disseminating identifiable data.

SUS+ has been in-house at the NHS England Digital Transformation Directorate since 2016 and has a fully automated single queue processing system, allowing the processing of CDS XML interchanges on arrival. Data with additional derived values (including HRGs) are made available to users via the SUS+ portal immediately on acceptance. 

From September 2022, SUS+ has been running on Cloud infrastructure, meeting the demands of daily, weekly, and monthly data processing at twice the speed of “on prem” infrastructure.

INBOUND, SUS+ is currently processing on average:

• Daily – 538 interchanges, 8.1 million submitted records
• Monthly – 16,417 interchanges, 249 million submitted records
• Average interchange processing time is 20 seconds

OUTBOUND, SUS+ is currently processing on average:

• Daily – 120 extracts, 30 million extracted records
• Monthly – 3,000 extracts, 900 million extracted records
• Average extract processing time is 45 seconds

SUS+ supports 20 daily delta extract feeds to the following customers:

• Hospital Episode Statistics (HES), NHS England analysts, Data Services for Commissioners Regional Offices (DSCROs), AstraZeneca, UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), and Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC).
• SUS+ is the only NHS data platform that fulfils a service level agreement to provide an ECDS delta extract to the NHS England analytical team every day by 10am.

Governance has been provided by the SUS+ leadership board and the SUS+ user group.