Efficient system usage

Most extracts are requested at the beginning of the week. Monday mornings are the busiest time and this tails off into Tuesday (the second busiest day). Where possible, SUS users are encouraged to run ad-hoc extracts outside of these times – a lower demand on this service should allow results to be returned more quickly. 

There is also a higher demand for extracts in the week immediately prior to a month- end reconciliation deadline. If possible, users should only run essential extracts at this time. Again, this should help all users to receive results more quickly.  Reconciliation dates can be found in the latest SUS PbR Submission guidance.  

The contracted hours of service for SUS are 8am to 6pm on normal workdays.

Although SUS is available outside of these service hours this is the time when the system can be taken out of service for maintenance activities. Initiating a large extract late in the day can cause it to fail as it will run into SUS overnight processing.

SUS will make two further attempts to restart a job that has been stopped by system processing. After a third stop the job will be marked as a failure. Users must limit the data to be extracted by selecting different dates or specifying organisations in the extract configuration, or no data will be obtained. Under these circumstances simply restarting the same extract will lead to further failure and more lost time for all users.

It is strongly advised that organisations do not extract data across extended date ranges on a regular basis.  These extracts take a long time to run and will impact extract performance for other users. 

NHS Digital reserves the right to re- prioritise or cancel extracts which are deemed to be using excessive amounts of system resource and which are adversely impacting 'normal' extract processing.

The ‘Reason for Access’ facility is used to simultaneously extract data across a number of providers and create a single file for all data relating to the organisation code matched against that reason.  However, selecting multiple reasons for access significantly increases the processing required to generate the data.  The resulting file returns one line of data, regardless of the number of reasons matched. It is understood that it may be appropriate to use multiple reasons, but extracts will be delivered more swiftly where an extract uses only one ‘Reason for Access’.

SUS also provides a facility which can automatically share extracts between users in the same organisation. If another user in the same organisation with the same role has requested an extract, the extract will be made available in both users SUS inboxes. This approach will help to reduce system burden of the practice of multiple users submitting the same extract requests.

Many extracts are run that are never downloaded.  This results in unnecessary load on the system that slows down the processing and delivery extracts for other users.  It is therefore recommended that users cancel queued extracts that are no longer required.

Users are encouraged to delete extract files that are no longer required and also delete the links to extracts from their own inbox that have been created by another user.
Where a link is deleted, the extract will still be visible to other users with whom the link has been shared.

Sometimes it is necessary to extract data for a large number of organisations in a single extract.  Users are encouraged only to schedule extracts for the organisations they require data for and to request separate extracts for each organisation. 

If only one reason for access is selected, then multiple organisations may run more quickly than running the same extract for each organisation and combining them locally. Extract production times can be variable depending on the load on the system at that time.  Extracts will take longer to get to the top of the queue (change from ‘Active’ or ‘Waiting’ to ‘Processing’) at busy times, such as immediately after a reconciliation point.

Users should download extracts to local systems rather than hold them in SUS. Users are therefore encouraged keep the number of extracts in SUS to a minimum and delete extracts once the data has been used.

It is an IG requirement that extracts are deleted from 3 months after the extract date.

Monthly trust statements

Monthly Trust Statements are generated to track the status of all data submissions up to the date displayed on the report header. The reports are used to check the status of all submissions for a particular organisation.

Senders are encouraged to use the reports to check that data has been received by SUS, particularly after any organisational or system (PAS or XML) changes. Monthly Trust Statements are available. 

The monthly database counts workbooks track the number of records in SUS by Activity Month for the current year and previous two preceding years. Activity is displayed for each CDS type on a separate worksheet and can be used to highlight any peaks and troughs in submissions, or when an organisation has duplicated or deleted data, or started or stopped submitting data.

The monthly performance reviews show service activity levels, delivery performance against targets and system statistics.

On most standard builds, users will not experience any problems and the Portal should function as expected.  However, in a small number of cases, browser compatibility or instability issues have been encountered. In nearly all cases, these browser compatibility issues have been successfully resolved by the provider or commissioner’s local IT department or service solution.

Users experiencing issues should raise a service call with the National Service Desk (NSD).