Missed Inclusion Dates and Retrospective Submissions

The SUS Submission Timetable (published annually on the SUS PbR Guidance webpage) provides an important supporting timescale framework for the NHS payment system. It enables the production of point in time snapshots of activity data to be provided to providers and commissioners from a known ‘Inclusion Date’ (submission deadline).

It is possible for data senders to miss an Inclusion Date or need to resubmit corrected or missing data retrospectively.

NHS Digital is not permitted to change the data submitted to SUS from provider organisations because SUS is used as a financial reimbursement solution.  It is therefore necessary for the sender organisation to resolve the situation by resubmitting the appropriate data, using either BULK Update or NET Change.

However, there are different factors and implications to consider for each situation, as described below.

Missing an Inclusion Date is commonly due to a provider or their XML translation supplier encountering technical issues or problems when submitting CDS records via XML.

The impact of missing an Inclusion Date is that the Reconciliation and Post- Reconciliation views will not contain up-to- date activity data.

Where a sender organisation has missed Inclusion Date, they should submit their activity and contact their commissioner to explain that the data has been submitted late and that it is available in the SUS PbR Current view and SEM view. Both organisations can then use the PbR Current view to determine a baseline to support contract reconciliation.

Activity data can change over time and may need to be corrected or completed.

Providers can resubmit data as often as they wish, as long as this is in line with guidance for their chosen submission method (BULK or NET).

Where resubmissions are made before an Inclusion Date there is no impact. However, where resubmissions are made after an Inclusion Date the appropriate action should be taken, as described earlier in Missing an Inclusion Date. 

SUS users wishing to perform large retrospective submissions are encouraged to submit them on a staged, month by month basis, ensuring that the resubmitted data is correct each month. SUS expects year to date resubmissions to occur as one offs every 3 to 6 months and at annual refresh. SUS users are reminded that Information Governance rules are “minimum amount of data sent for a specific purpose”.

In most cases the priority for resubmission should be the most recent full month. Working back through the current financial year months, each month should be resubmitted and checked before moving on to the next. Inclusion Dates have already passed but this will allow corrected data in PbR Current or SEM to be accessed by commissioners.

HES (Hospital Episode Statistics) data is updated monthly and each month the current financial year activity data submitted to SUS is used to update HES. Therefore, corrected or late-submitted data received after Inclusion Date will be reflected in HES in the following month.

If data is resubmitted after HES Annual Refresh, HES will not be updated with corrected data for that financial year. If this happens, data senders are advised to cntact [email protected] and request that a HES Data Quality (DQ) note is placed against the relevant HES activity data for the data sender organisation.