NHS England is commissioning a modern data service from Health and Social Care Information Centre on behalf of the entire health and social care system. Known as care.data this programme will build on the existing data services such as the Hospital Episodes Statistics (HES) service, which was launched in 1989, and expand it to provide linked data, that will eventually cover all care settings both in and outside of hospital.
The General practice Extraction Service will be used to extract TP data each month. Initially data will cover the period from April 2013 onwards. The identifiers to be extracted are: NHS number, date of birth, postcode and gender which will allow patients' GP data to be linked to their hospital data. No free text will be extracted, only coded information about referrals, NHS prescriptions and other clinical data. The technical specification of the extract can be found at www.england.nhs.uk/tsd/data-info.
For further information please follow the links below:
www.nhs.uk/NHSEngland/thenhs/records/healthrecords/Pages/care-data.aspx
www.nhs.uk/caredata
www.hscic.gov.uk