Info centre to run DMICs

New Data Management Integration Centres, being developed within the NHS Commissioning Board, will have to become part of the Health and Social Care Information Centre to operate legally.

Staff, assets and liabilities of the centres will have to be transferred to the information centre by April.

Nine DMICs are being set up by commissioning support units to provide data validation, integration and storage for clinical commissioning groups, CSUs and local authorities in regard to their public health role.

An HSCIC spokesperson explained that the NHS CB and the Department of Health had considered options for how DMICs could lawfully and securely process patient identifiable data and agreed that incorporating them within the HSCIC was the best option.

She said discussions were ongoing about how DMICs would work with the HSCIC and how they could make efficient use of the centre’s existing data services and tools.

The information centre’s latest board minutes include a risk register which describes how NHS organisations are openly planning to establish patient identifiable data repositories for their own area of interest.

In doing so, they are failing to recognise the centre’s role established under the Health and Social Care Act 2012, the report explains.

The register identifies the proposed establishment of DMICs within the commissioning board as a concern.

The chief executive’s report describes the background to work done over the past year on the creation of regional DMICs to, “help the NHS CB to hold CCGs to account for improvement in quality of healthcare and patient outcomes through better commissioning”.

“This had raised a number of issues and it was now mooted that DMICs were brought under the remit of the new HSCIC in order to make the most efficient use of standard toolsets/solutions for data storing, linking and sharing,” the report says.

“As this arrangement was only agreed in December 2012, there is a great deal of detail to be resolved including staff transfer, assets and liabilities transfer and governance arrangements.”

Implications for information governance are also being explored.