NHS Digital Data Release Register - reformatted

NHS South West London Integrated Care Board projects

60 data files in total were disseminated unsafely (information about files used safely is missing for TRE/"system access" projects).

SWL ICB Population Health Benchmarking — NIC-791919-T4Y0Y

Opt outs honoured: No (Excuses: Does not include the flow of confidential data)

Legal basis: Health and Social Care Act 2012 – s261(2)(a)

Purposes: No (ICB - Integrated Care Board)

Sensitive: Non-Sensitive

When:DSA runs 2026-02 – 2027-02 2026.03 — 2026.03.

Access method: One-Off

Data-controller type: NHS SOUTH WEST LONDON INTEGRATED CARE BOARD

Sublicensing allowed: No

AGD/predecessor discussions: AGD minutes - 12th February 2026 - final.pdf

Datasets:

  1. Emergency Care Data Set (ECDS)
  2. Hospital Episode Statistics Accident and Emergency (HES A and E)
  3. Hospital Episode Statistics Admitted Patient Care (HES APC)
  4. Hospital Episode Statistics Outpatients (HES OP)

Type of data: Anonymised - ICO Code Compliant

Objectives:

The Data will be used for the purpose of commissioning and risk stratification.

The Data will be used for population health analysis to understand patient demographics and activity counts per patient for patients accessing NHS hospital services across England. Control and participant groups will be defined by demographic or clinical stratifications within the HES data to identify inequalities.

The analysis will be used by NHS South West London Integrated Care Board for strategic commissioning purposes. It is important for NHS South West London Integrated Care Board to be able to benchmark themselves against other areas in the country to understand the areas of highest concern. NHS South West London Integrated Care Board are unable to do this in detail without having access to more detailed HES data.

The analysis looks to identify inequalities in the following areas:
• Inpatient length of stays
• RTT waiting times
• A&E admissions
• DNA and cancellation rates
• Readmission rates
• Avoidable admissions
• Evidence-Based Interventions
• Discharge delays – including discharges to Care Homes
• In-hours vs Out-of-hours activity

Expected Benefits:

Data processing is expected to deliver the following public benefits:

- Improved evidence for decision-making
Findings will contribute to evidence-based commissioning and planning by NHS South West London ICB and its Integrated Care System (ICS). The analysis will provide a clearer understanding of local health and care needs, variation in access, and inequalities in outcomes. This will enable policymakers, clinicians, and system leaders to make informed decisions that directly improve patient care and experience.

- Understanding health needs and inequalities
The research will advance understanding of regional and national trends in hospital activity, including inpatient stays, A&E attendances, waiting times, and readmissions. By stratifying results across demographics, we will identify where inequalities exist (e.g. in access to elective care or avoidable admissions) and highlight where interventions are required.

- Service improvement and preventative care
Insights will inform the design of interventions that improve patient flow, reduce delays, and target avoidable admissions. The work will also highlight areas for preventative action (e.g. conditions leading to avoidable A&E use), supporting proactive and preventative models of care.

- Equity and allocation of resources
Outputs will be used to inform more equitable allocation of resources, ensuring that funding and service design are targeted at populations with the greatest health inequalities. This will help improve equity of access, experience, and outcomes across South West London and allow benchmarking against other areas nationally.

- Quality of care and best practice
Analysis will provide a mechanism to monitor variation in care quality (e.g. DNA rates, length of stay, discharge delays). This will allow the ICB to identify areas of best practice for wider adoption, and areas of poorer performance where remedial action is needed, thereby improving overall standards of care.

- Knowledge creation
The project will support system-wide learning by generating evidence that may be shared with ICS partners, NHS England, and wider health policy stakeholders.

By identifying inequalities, NHS South West London Integrated Care Board aims to reduce inequalities, improve patient safety and experience, improve the design and targeting of health services, and strengthen the evidence base available to decision-makers across health and social care.

Efforts will be made to raise awareness among local charities, Healthwatch, and voluntary/community organisations to ensure findings are acted on beyond the ICB.

The use of the data could:
- help the system to better understand the health and care needs of populations.
- lead to the identification or improvement of treatments or interventions, or health and care system design to improve health and care outcomes or experience.
- advance understanding of regional and national trends in health and social care needs.
- inform planning health services and programmes, for example to improve equity of access, experience and outcomes.
- inform decisions on how to effectively allocate and evaluate funding according to health needs.
- provide a mechanism for checking the quality of care. This could include identifying areas of good practice to learn from, or areas of poorer practice which need to be addressed.

Outputs:

The expected outputs of the processing will be:
- Reports (produced annually) for NHS South West London ICB leadership and system partners, focusing on variation and inequalities in care (e.g. inpatient length of stay, A&E admissions, readmissions, RTT waiting times).
- Dashboards developed for internal use within the ICB, providing aggregated, non-disclosive population health metrics. These will not expose record-level data and will be restricted to aggregated outputs. Development of population health dashboards will support decision-making across partner organisations.
- Briefing documents and slide packs for ICS Boards, Place-based Partnerships, and system leadership groups to support commissioning decisions.
- Creation of an evaluation framework for monitoring inequalities and patient outcomes

The outputs will not contain NHS England Data and will only contain aggregated information with small numbers suppressed as appropriate in line with the relevant disclosure rules for the dataset(s) from which the information was derived.

The outputs will be communicated to relevant recipients through the following dissemination channels:
- Regular quarterly reporting and internal dashboards will be shared with system stakeholders (ICB executives, ICS boards, Place-based leadership teams) throughout the project to inform commissioning and service redesign.
- Website publications
- Newsletters to local stakeholders
- Workshops/webinars with partner organisations
- Targeted briefings to NHS England
- Contributions to national learning events.
- Annual public reports and presentations will be published to ensure transparency and public accountability.
- An evaluation framework for monitoring inequalities and patient outcomes may be shared across NHS ICSs to promote system learning.
- Findings will also be shared continuously with ICB and ICS partners through board briefings, workshops, and bilateral engagement.

Processing:

No data will flow to NHS England for the purposes of this Data Sharing Agreement (DSA).

NHS England will provide the relevant records from the HES and ECDS datasets to SWL ICB. The Data will contain no direct identifying data items. The Data will be pseudonymised and individuals cannot be reidentified through linkage with other data in the possession of the recipient.

The Data will be transferred to a data warehouse owned by North East London ICB (NEL ICB).

The Data will not be transferred to any other location.

The Data will be stored on servers at NEL ICB.

The Data will be accessed by authorised personnel via remote access.

The Controller(s) must confirm and provide evidence upon audit by NHS England that access via any remote device complies with the data security obligations within this DSA and the Data Sharing Framework Contract.

For remote access:
- Remote access will only be from secure locations situated within the territory of use (as further restricted elsewhere within the DSA if so done) stated within this DSA;
- Access controls granting users the minimum level of access required are in place;
- Remote access is only via secure connections (e.g., VPNs or secure protocols) to protect data;
- Multifactor authentication (MFA) is required for remote access;
- Device security, including up-to-date software and operating systems, antivirus software, and enabled firewalls are utilised for the remote access;
- All remote access is undertaken within the scope of the organisation’s DSPT (or other security arrangements as per this DSA) and complies with the organisation’s remote access policy.

The above applies in addition to any condition set out elsewhere within the DSA (e.g. who may carry out processing, and for what purpose).

The Data will be linked using GP / provider practice code with quality metrics such as patient satisfaction scores to assess the relationships between patient activity and quality of care.

DSfC - NHS South West London Integrated Care Board - IV, RS & Comm — NIC-615998-S4B4H

Opt outs honoured: (Excuses: Mixture of confidential data flow(s) with support under section 251 NHS Act 2006 and non-confidential data flow(s))

Legal basis: Health and Social Care Act 2012 - s261(5)(d), Health and Social Care Act 2012 – s261(7); National Health Service Act 2006 - s251 - 'Control of patient information'., Health and Social Care Act 2012 – s261(7)

Purposes: No (ICB - Integrated Care Board)

Sensitive: Sensitive

When:DSA runs 2022-11 – 2025-11

Access method: Frequent Adhoc Flow

Data-controller type: NHS SOUTH WEST LONDON INTEGRATED CARE BOARD

Sublicensing allowed: Yes

Datasets:

  1. Commissioning Datasets
  2. Invoice Validation Datasets
  3. Risk Stratification Datasets

Type of data: Anonymised - ICO Code Compliant, Identifiable

Expected Benefits:

INVOICE VALIDATION
The invoice validation process supports the ongoing delivery of patient care across the NHS and the ICB region by:
1. Ensuring that activity is fully financially validated.
2. Ensuring that service providers are accurately paid for the patient’s treatment.
3. Enabling services to be planned, commissioned, managed, and subjected to financial control.
4. Enabling commissioners to confirm that they are paying appropriately for treatment of patients for whom they are responsible.
5. Fulfilling commissioners duties to fiscal probity and scrutiny.
6. Ensuring full financial accountability for relevant organisations.
7. Ensuring robust commissioning and performance management.
8. Ensuring commissioning objectives do not compromise patient confidentiality.
9. Ensuring the avoidance of misappropriation of public funds.

COMMISSIONING
1. Supporting Quality Innovation Productivity and Prevention (QIPP) to review demand management, integrated care and pathways.
2. Supporting Joint Strategic Needs Assessment (JSNA) for specific disease types.
3. Health economic modelling to analyse provider performance and patient pathways.
4. Commissioning cycle support for grouping and re-costing previous activity.
5. Enables monitoring of commissioned services to ensure they are performing as expected.
6. Improved planning by better understanding patient flows through the healthcare system, thus allowing commissioners to identify priorities and identify commissioning plans to address these (pathways would be designed by service providers within the ICS with input from appropriate stakeholders including patient and public representation).
7. Reduced emergency readmissions, especially avoidable emergency admissions leading to improved quality of services. This is achieved through mapping of frequent users of emergency services and early intervention of appropriate care.
8. Improved access to services by identifying which services may be in demand but have poor access, and from this identify areas where improvement is required.
9. Potentially reduced premature mortality by more targeted intervention in primary care, which supports the commissioner to meets its requirement to reduce premature mortality in line with the ICB Outcome Framework.
10. Better understanding of the health of and the variations in health outcomes within the population to help understand local population characteristics.
11. Better understanding of contract requirements, contract execution, and required services for management of existing contracts, and to assist with identification and planning of future contracts.
12. Insights into patient outcomes, and identification of the possible efficacy of outcomes-based contracting opportunities.
13. Providing greater understanding of the underlying causes and look to commission improved supportive networks, this would be ongoing work which would be continually assessed.
14. Insight to understand the numerous factors that play a role in the outcome for patients in all datasets. The linkage allows the reporting both prior to, during and after the activity, to provide greater assurance on predictive outcomes and delivery of best practice.
15. Provision of indicators of health problems, and patterns of risk within the commissioning region.
16. Support of benchmarking for evaluating progress in future years.
17. Assists commissioners to make better decisions to support patients and drive changes in health care.
18. Allows comparisons of providers performance to assist improvement in services – increase the quality.
19. Allow analysis of health care provision to be completed to support the needs of the health profile of the population within the ICB area based on the full analysis of multiple pseudonymised datasets.
20. To evaluate the impact of new services and innovations (e.g. if commissioners implement a new service or type of procedure with a provider, they can evaluate whether it improves outcomes for patients compared to the previous one).

DIRECT CARE
1. Enables clinical intervention to prevent worse outcomes, such as A&E attendance.
2. Allows the ICB to perform their statutory duty to protect patients.
3. Allows clinicians with direct care responsibilities to improve quality of care for patients identified. This may reduce the risk of unwanted emergency hospital admission, premature complications of disease and of premature death.

Outputs:

INVOICE VALIDATION
1. Accurate budget reports.
2. Enable a system of communication that will enable the ICB to challenge invoices and raise discrepancies and disputes.
3. Reports on the accuracy of invoices.
4. Validation of invoices for non-contracted events where a service delivered to a patient by a provider that does not have a written contract with the patient’s responsible commissioner, but does have a written contract with another NHS commissioner/s.
5. Budget control of the ICB.

The ICB will be provided with the pseudonymised outputs of the risk stratification tool for which they are able to:
1. Identify patient groups at risk of deterioration and providing effective care.
2. Set up capitated budgets – budgets based on care provided to the specific population.
3. Identify health determinants of risk of admission to hospital, or other adverse care outcomes.
4. Monitor vulnerable groups of patients including but not limited to frailty, COPD, Diabetes, elderly.
5. Health needs assessments – identifying numbers of patients with specific health conditions or combination of conditions.
6. Classify vulnerable groups based on: disease profiles; conditions currently being treated; current service use; pharmacy use and risk of future overall cost.
7. Production of Theographs – a visual timeline of a patients encounters with hospital providers.
8. Analyse based on specific diseases.
9. Aggregate reporting of number and percentage of population found to be at risk.

COMMISSIONING
1. Commissioner reporting on providers, finances, readmission analysis etc…
2. Production of aggregate reports for ICB Business Intelligence.
3. Production of project / programme level dashboards.
4. Monitoring of acute / community / mental health quality matrix.
5. Clinical coding reviews / audits.
6. Budget reporting down to individual GP Practice level.
7. GP Practice level dashboard reports.
8. Comparators of ICB performance with similar ICBs as set out by a specific range of care quality and performance measures detailed activity and cost reports.
9. Data Quality and Validation measures allowing data quality checks on the submitted data.
10. Contract Management and Modelling.
11. Patient Stratification dashboards to highlight cohorts of patients with similar conditions at risk.
12. Manage demand, by understanding the quantity of assessments required ICBs are able to improve the care service for patients by predicting the impact on certain care pathways and ensure the secondary care system has enough capacity to manage the demand.
13. Identify low priority procedures which could be directed to community-based alternatives and as such commission these services and deflect referrals for low priority procedures resulting in a reduction in hospital referrals.
14. Compare providers (trusts) mortality outcomes to the national baseline.
15. Identify medication prescribing trends and their effectiveness.
16. Linking prescribing habits to entry points into the health and social care system.
17. Identify, quantify and understand cohorts of patient’s high numbers of different medications (polypharmacy).
18. Feedback to NHS service providers on data quality at an aggregate and individual record level – only on data initially provided by the service providers.

DIRECT CARE
1. Reports and dashboards that highlight cohorts of patients that can be targeted for clinical intervention by direct health and care professionals.
2. Lists of at risk patients made available to direct health and care professionals that require direct care intervention.
3. Reports and dashboards to show the outcome of clinical intervention including patient outcomes and modelled transactional cost savings.