The 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
• DCB2212 Drugs 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.

The PLCM standard supports the Aggregate Contract Monitoring (ACM) standard, by providing the patient level detail to the aggregate information contained within the ACM. It also contains details about patient level clinical activities that are not found in the current Commissioning Data Set (CDS) flows. 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:

• 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.