Highlights: Best Practice Tariff

The NJR is a mandatory dataset which supports the Best Practice Tariff

A Best Practice Tariff (BPT) is a national price paid to providers and is designed to incentivise high quality and cost-effective care. The aim is to reduce unexplained variation in clinical quality and to encourage best practice. The price differential between best practice and usual care is calculated to ensure that the expected costs of undertaking best practice are reflected and to create an incentive for providers to shift from usual care to best practice. For a Trust submitting data to the NJR, the BPT will only be paid if the compliance rates for hip and knee surgery meet specific targets, along with specified targets for consent.

In order to receive the BPT for hip and knee joint replacement surgery, NHS Trusts in England must achieve a minimum compliance rate of 85% with the NJR and an NJR ‘Not Recorded’ consent rate of less than 15%.  The current BPT and targets apply for the financial years 2017/18 and 2018/19 and are more demanding targets than the previous requirements (75% compliance and 25% unknown consent).

A new Best Practice Tariff criterion was introduced from 1 April 2019 relating to hip replacement in patients aged over 70.  In order to meet the BPT requirement, providers must use cemented or hybrid prostheses for at least 80% of patients aged over 70.

The NJR Centre compares data from HES with records submitted to the NJR to calculate the compliance rate. The files sent to the Best Practice Tariff team each quarter are available to download from the NJR website - Best Practice Tariff page.