The Department of Health and Social Care is aiming to support policymakers by extracting patient data related to those who receive NHS-funded social care.

The department has signed a contract with specialist firm CHS Healthcare, that provides systems and support in areas of the health sector such as care management and hospital discharge, newly published procurement information has revealed.

The DHSC was seeking a supplier of systems related to “continuing healthcare”, available to those with “needs arising from disability, accident or illness that cannot be met by existing universal or specialist services alone”, with a larger project later in 2022 requiring all system suppliers to provide complete sets of “patient-level data” to NHS England.

The CHS Healthcare engagement is being run by the government directly, rather than the NHS; it is a smaller, more targeted collation of information, encompassing a “small subset of data fields” to specifically support the work of policymakers focused on continuing healthcare.

“The DHSC is looking to improve its evidence base for policy-development purposes and, to do this, are [seeking] a new data extraction from one system supplier which has CCG (clinical commissioning group) coverage at least 60%,” according to commercial documents.

The contract, which is already in effect, will run for the next four months, including an expected total of 60 days’ work. The deal, which will be worth at least £22,000 to the supplier, could then be extended for a further term of six months.