The Drugs Patient Level Contract Monitoring information standard is one of a set of standards being introduced by NHS England, initially on a voluntary basis, to enable national consistency of the flow of cost and activity information from providers to commissioners.

The others are:

• DCB2050 Aggregate Contract Monitoring
• DCB3003 Patient Level Contract Monitoring
• DCB3002 Devices Patient Level Contract Monitoring.

Having national standards to support contract monitoring will:

• reduce burden
• allow simpler and more consistent reporting
• allow easier reconciliation and validation of invoices
• provide support for service change planning and hospital capacity analysis
• improve forecasting
• allow greater monitoring of equity of access to services.

This specific Drugs standard is a patient level data set covering all NHS-funded high cost prescribed items not reimbursed through the National Tariff Payment System. Data is required to be submitted to NHS England on a monthly basis. In the long term, the developers will work with NHS England to enhance the Commissioning Data Sets (DAPB0092) to hold this information, thereby removing the need for separate flows.

About this change

The changes introduced in this release are designed to:

• enable the reporting of ethnic category
• remove the number of very general purpose (VGP) data elements, to improve information governance and data quality
• improve consistency across the other contract monitoring data sets
• include recent changes made to the NHS Data Model and Dictionary.

In addition, this information standard is now made mandatory for:

• NHS or Independent Sector providers commissioned to provide acute services under the full-length version of the NHS Standard Contract.

The standard remains voluntary for other providers; full details are in the Change Specification.