What is NHS Comparators?

NHS Comparators is an analytical service for commissioners and providers. It helps improve the quality of care delivered by benchmarking and comparing activity and costs on a local, regional and national level. NHS Comparators pulls together:

• activity and costed data through the Payment by Results (PbR) tariff from the Secondary Uses Service (SUS)
• information from The Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF)
• GP practice demographic population profile data

Log on to NHS Comparators.

Why do we have NHS Comparators?

Although local knowledge is needed for interpretation, the data in NHS Comparators may indicate areas where activity or clinical practice is out of line with peers – highlighting possible quality of care implications or areas where there are potential cost savings to be made. NHS Comparators looks at a whole range of activity: in-patient, outpatient and disease-specific:

commissioners can use the service to identify and investigate differences in referral and access rates to secondary care in terms of costs and activity

providers can use the service to benchmark their performance on a range of local and national comparators.

What are the benefits of NHS Comparators?

Easy to access and understand, the service is a valuable resource to all health professionals, not just information specialists:

• get instant access to hundreds of comparators
• investigate comparative access rates and performance at aggregate level by GP practice, PCT level, provider level or above
• view suggestions for interpretation of high or low values for each comparator
• access support via the online demos and knowledge base

What is in NHS Comparators?

There are around 200 comparators, many of which can be broken down by programme budget category or grouped speciality. In addition, there are specific comparators relating to:

• accident and emergency
• maternity
• mental health
• long-term conditions
• prescribing
• GP survey
• QOF

Payment by results

Our Payment by Results indicators allow you to identify where you may be able to improve coding to increase income.

Read about the new Payment by Results indicators on NHS Comparators.

Start using NHS Comparators

NHS Comparators is free to NHS organisations. Register for NHS Comparators.

Still not sure? Take a look at a demo of NHS Comparators.