NHS North of England Commissioning Support Unit: NHS North of England Commissioning Support (NECS) provides a comprehensive business intelligence (BI) service to a wide range of NHS organisations.

Data-sharing agreement from NHS Digital registers of approved data releases, 2014–2019. Evidence status: source reported.

Organisation: NHS North of England Commissioning Support Unit
Source reference: DARS-NIC-08095-P4D0D-v3.6
Jurisdiction: England
Licence: Open Government Licence v3.0, subject to NHS England terms and exclusions

Register reference: DARS-NIC-08095-P4D0D-v3.6
Agreement period: not published to no end date published
For commercial purposes (as marked in the register): Not stated
Release files listed by NHS England: 75

Data approved

Hospital Episode Statistics Accident and Emergency
Hospital Episode Statistics Admitted Patient Care
Hospital Episode Statistics Critical Care
Hospital Episode Statistics Outpatients

Objective, as published

NHS North of England Commissioning Support (NECS) provides a comprehensive business intelligence (BI) service to a wide range of NHS organisations. This includes both standard analytics and reporting, and deep-dives and diagnostic exercises to offer insight and intelligence on a commissioner’s health economy. In addition NECS offer a mature business intelligence application (RAIDR) allowing self-service access to a range of dashboards and configurable reports. This tool is available on a subscription basis only to NHS organisations and local authorities. It is currently used by Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs), internally within the Commissioning Support Unit (CSU) through specialist support teams and by CCG member practices. Both the business intelligence team and RAIDR utilise data feeds from secondary and community care, mental health services, urgent and primary care, prescribing and other NHS Digital published datasets such as the Quality Outcomes Framework (QOF), Referral to Treatment Times (RTT) etc. These data sets are provided either by the Data Services for Commissioners Regional Office (DSCRO) service, downloaded directly from the NHS England data catalogue or directly from provider organisations. Data delivered via the DSCRO is pseudonymised in to the CSU where the BI service and RAIDR are hosted. Published data is downloaded in aggregate form from NHS Digital and NHS England websites. There will be no direct linkage between HES data records and other data al…

Expected benefits, as published

Utilising HES data for reporting will provide more accurate peer groups for benchmarking purposes rather than simply comparing neighbouring commissioners as happens now using DSCRO supplied data. Benchmarking is currently restricted to data held by the local DSCRO so CCGs cannot be compared against their identifier peers as these are often elsewhere in the country. An example is where the CSU (on behalf of a local CCG) has undertaken reporting of emergency admission rates with a view to altering patient pathways. Emergency admission rates for local providers have been used to identify best practice and pathways altered to reduce admissions. However this exercise was limited to local hospitals as NECS did not have national data available. The CCG were then able to compare their local pathw…

Source: https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukgwa/2019/https://digital.nhs.uk/binaries/content/assets/website-assets/service/dars/release-registers/releaseregister20180301_20180524.xlsx. Captured 2026-10-30.

Limitations: Agreement as recorded in an NHS Digital register of approved data releases (2014–2019), retrieved from the UK Government Web Archive. That register lists releases made in its period and the agreement's purpose statement as it then stood; it gives no agreement dates, and the agreement may have changed since. Imported only where a paper quotes a reference no current register holds.