CDAON Webinar: Strategic Commissioning – what should data & analytics teams be doing?
CDAON webinar, Friday, 31 July 2026 Speakers: Rachel McIlroy, System Implementation Lead and Chiraag Dave, Strategic Commissioning Development Programme, NHS England.
Every so often a policy arrives that redraws the job description of an entire profession, strategic commissioning is one of them. When integrated care boards are asked to plan, purchase, monitor and evaluate services on the strength of evidence, the analytical function stops being a support service and becomes the engine room. That was the message when the network gathered at the end of July to hear from the NHS England team building the national support offer, and it is why we think every data and analytics leader in the country should take fifteen minutes to read on.
A programme built in five parts
Rachel McIlroy touched on Strategic commissioning flows from the 10-Year Plan and the framework published late last year, and anyone who has worked in population health management will recognise its cycle of understanding need, setting strategy, allocating resources and evaluating impact. The Strategic Commissioning Development Programme wraps national support around that cycle through five strands: capability and learning, leadership and decision-making, an eighteen-month applied commissioning programme of action learning sets, intelligence and evaluation, and a policy arm tracking new provider models such as integrated health organisations.
Chiraag Dave then walked us through the Commissioning Academy, the programme’s front door on the NHS Futures platform. It is free, open to anyone with an interest rather than commissioners alone, and already stocked with a foundation e-module, case studies, international examples and an active discussion forum. Its most practical asset is the diagnostic toolkit, a self-assessment that generates a heat map of capability across eight functional areas. It works for an individual, scales to a team, and when collated builds a picture of an entire ICB.
Where should our members start? Complete the toolkit yourself, understand where your own influence sits, the results are designed to start conversations, including with neighbouring systems who may have already cracked a problem you are still carrying.
Growing capability, not lending it
The strand of most direct interest to this network is the Strategic Commissioning Intelligence Centre, which Rachel McIlroy leads with the Strategy Unit. It will develop the capability that already exists inside ICB intelligence functions, through training in less familiar disciplines such as health economics, actuarial analysis and outcomes data, a national analytical network built from the existing Midlands model, and support for the Federated Data Platform’s strategic commissioning tool, now in general availability for any ICB that wants to adopt it. Not every system can employ a health economist and a data scientist, and the honest answer offered here was to draw that expertise together across the ICS footprint rather than pretend each ICB can hold it alone.
Curious questions
Dartford and Gravesham NHS Trust described reading her ICB’s commissioning strategy from an acute perspective and realising the outcome data underpinning future payments sits largely beyond Trust’s reach, raising the risk of providers signing contracts whose consequences they cannot fully see. Norfolk and Suffolk ICB explained how sub-licensing has opened commissioning data assets to providers for strategic analysis, only for progress to stall at the boundary between pseudonymised insight and operational action for real patients on real waiting lists.
Rachel explained, Primary care data is, in her words, the elephant in the room, and the left shift cannot be delivered blind. Analysts have too often demanded all the data rather than making the precise, purposeful case for what is needed and why. Conversations with information governance, DARS and the re-identification service are now beginning, and international evidence from Denmark, Portugal, the Netherlands and the Basque Country is being gathered so England is not reinventing the wheel.
What happens next
Autumn brings the action learning sets, further e-learning, a monthly learning forum and neighbourhood learning networks, with evaluation running through the programme and strategic commissioning expected to feature in ICB annual assessments in due course.
We observed four themes: whole-system data visibility will decide whether this works, local contracts will need fundamentally different KPIs, primary care data access is essential, and the diagnostic toolkit is the first component to begin with.
Strategic Commissioning Development Programme slide-deck can be accessed here.