NHS commissioners can now monitor their Payment by Results (PbR) expenditure and providers can keep track of income using NHS Comparators. Seven new indicators have been added to the free online service, including percentage of excess bed days – when patients stay in hospital past the trim point – and the percentage of non-PbR qualified events.

The PbR indicators can be broken down by healthcare resource group (HRG), allowing users to monitor income and expenditure for specific type and complexity of treatment.

With financial management a bigger issue than ever for commissioners and providers, the new indicators allow you to understand where income and expenditure could be better managed. With the PbR Income/Expenditure comparators, users can identify how many spells of care have been recorded as ‘unclassified', for which no payment has been received. This may show where poor coding has prevented a provider from receiving payment.

NHS Comparators also contains over 200 other ‘core' comparators, ranging from emergency admissions to maternity care that can be used for benchmarking. It has now been refreshed with the latest data for Q3 (October to December) 2009/10.

• Read more on NHS Comparators.
• Log on to NHS Comparators (external).