ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the trust-based systems that feed into national data, such as Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) and waiting list data. Waiting list data can be linked to general practitioner data to detail every referral by general practice to each specialty. It is envisaged that future systems will synthesise more completely secondary and primary care data. Data accessible to the trust include the following from primary care: demographics, consultations, diagnoses, referrals, blood tests and medications. The chapter looks at the data that relate to specific departments or specialties such as accident and emergency medicine, pathology, radiology, outpatient systems and pharmaceutical costs. Healthcare resource groups (HRGs) in accident and emergency medicine were published in 2001. HRGs are a way of top level allocation of costs to specialties. HRG analyses can provide a useful source of average costings. HRGs are cases grouped into clinically meaningful categories and represent roughly equal levels of healthcare resource consumption.
