Table 4.

Potential future developments in WSIC

Data gap	System sector	Current state and potential development
Private hospitals	Hospital	No plans yet
Private care homes	Social care	No plans yet
Private GPs	Primary care	Still very small sector, but potential very limited
Inpatient medications	Hospital	High-cost drugs already captured, but other drugs will need to come from pharmacy databases
Inpatient scans	Hospital	National Diagnostic Imaging Data set is newest part of HES* and captures such tests but, crucially, not their results, which would come from other hospital-specific systems
Inpatient lab test results	Hospital	No plans yet
Quality of life	all	This can potentially be recorded using Read codes in GP records
Patient activation measure	all	Already captured for around 5000 patients, and the number is growing
Over the counter medication use	Community care	None unless reported by patient and coded by GP
Medication adherence by the patient	all	Some Read codes exist for chronic diseases in primary care, usage unknown; some published algorithms exist for use with CPRD to estimate this
Patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs)	all	Captured nationally only for 4 procedures, linked to HES*
Real healthcare cost rather than price to the payer	Primary and secondary care	Not yet
Ambulance service	ambulance	London Ambulance Service database to be linked soon
NHS 111 telephone advice service	n/a	In discussion
ONS mortality data	all	Not yet but high priority
National clinical audits and registries	all	Could be linked via NHS number; CPRD link to several national audits e.g. cancer registry

*HES Hospital Episodes Statistics (national hospital administrative database for England)