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Cohorting as a Service (CaaS)

This service securely identifies groups of people with shared characteristics from national health data. 

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About this service

Cohorting as a Service (CaaS) enables population health interventions in England by delivering safe, high quality, clinically assured cohorts to more precisely target people for healthcare.

We define cohorts using demographic and clinical criteria, including characteristics like age, gender, location and/or clinical conditions. We build them from a range of data sources to provide a more accurate view of your target groups.

By working together, we can make sure the appropriate care reaches identified individuals quickly. In doing so, we anticipate higher participation rates in healthcare campaigns and ultimately, improved health outcomes.

Who this service is for

CaaS is for NHS England teams who need to identify groups of individuals for direct or indirect care.

Benefits

The CaaS team is an NHS service for NHS programmes, so is in-built into the NHS architecture. Some of the added benefits of using CaaS over an external supplier include:

Why use CaaS?
  • maintains rigorous clinical standards
  • ensures complete transparency in all clinical decisions, fostering trust and accountability
  • transforms complex policy and technical challenges into straightforward processes
  • enhances cohorting quality while minimising decision-making risks for programmes
  • ensures appropriate NHS data is used
  • user-friendly, easily accessible and fully aligned with NHS architecture and engineering standards

How to access this service

Complete the online enquiry form to schedule an early engagement call.

The information provided on the form will help the team understand your requirements and provide support throughout the onboarding process.

How this service works

Identify and target the people who need your service.

  1. Describe the people you want to target: use combinations of demographic, clinical or other custom characteristics to define the individuals you need to target. 
  2. Our service finds them for you: using the cohorting process system, CaaS analyses multiple data sets to safely, quickly and accurately find the individuals for your cohorts. 
  3. Get your cohorts and start targeting individuals: use your cohorts to improve health outcomes by running targeted initiatives such as invite campaigns, reminders and more.
 
What the image shows
  1. The healthcare programme asks about how to onboard and what funding and legal documentation is needed. 
  2. Once all required documentation is obtained by the requesting programme, they can onboard with CaaS. 
  3. Our clinical and onboarding teams work with the programme to identify possible data sources and understand any clinical risks within the data. 
  4. The programme provides the final cohort definition, and the Cohort Processing System (CPS) creates the cohort. 
  5. Once the cohort is built, the programme can securely access the cohort data and the documentation on how the cohort was created. 
  6. The programme can then use the data for direct care purposes and supporting activities as specified in their Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA). 

Examples of use

Since 2022, CaaS has delivered cohorts for vaccination, screening and personal prevention health campaigns:

Live cohorts in operation

CaaS supports live cohorts for NHS England programmes, including:

  • COVID-19 Spring 2026 Campaign: CaaS provided cohorting based on clinical risk and eligibility criteria to assist with spring vaccination campaign
  • Talking Therapies cohort: the talking therapies cohort is targeting individuals with specific long term health conditions who are known to benefit from Talking Therapy Services - this campaign is to raise awareness and signpost cohorted individuals to the service
  • Routine breast screening: CaaS replaced previous methods for identifying individuals eligible for the Breast Screening Programme, leveraging PDS data to ensure accuracy, efficiency, and continuity

  • Latent Tuberculosis Infection Test and Treatment Programme 2025: NHS England and UKHSA commissioned CaaS to produce retrospective and ongoing latent TB cohorts for the national LTBI testing and treatment programme

  • Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) campaign: CaaS uses demographic and clinical data to identify older groups of people for RSV immunisation efforts
Past cohorts

  • Influenza Autumn Winter 2025: CaaS identifies patients eligible for the Autumn-Winter 2025 flu vaccination using demographic and clinical risk data from GPES and SNOMED CT coding. 

  • COVID-19 autumn winter 2025 campaign: CaaS used national health data to securely identify at-risk individuals, enabling targeted outreach for the COVID-19 autumn winter 2025 vaccination campaign.

  • COVID-19 Spring 2025: CaaS provided cohorting based on clinical risk and eligibility criteria to assist with spring vaccination campaign

  • COVID-19 winter 2024 campaign: CaaS used national health data to securely identify at-risk individuals, enabling targeted outreach for the COVID-19 autumn winter 2025 vaccination campaign.
  • Influenza vaccinations 2024 to 2025: The team created clinically assured cohorts, prioritising young and old populations to help vaccine campaigns reach the more vulnerable for their flu jabs.
  • MMR catch-up campaign 2024: Support included identifying children and young adults who missed previous MMR doses, enabling targeted messaging and follow-up.
  • COVID-19 spring 2024 campaign: CaaS provided cohorting based on clinical risk and eligibility criteria to assist with spring booster rollout.
  • Influenza vaccinations 2023 to 2024: The service enabled repeatable cohort generation to support annual flu vaccine delivery to high-risk populations.
  • COVID-19 clinical risk groups cohort 2023: CaaS helped define and extract cohorts based on clinical coding to prioritise individuals with underlying health conditions.
  • Influenza vaccinations 2022 - 2023: The team supported scalable cohort creation to streamline flu vaccine distribution across NHS programmes.
  • COVID-19 autumn booster vaccinations 2022 to 2023: CaaS facilitated timely identification of eligible individuals for autumn boosters using integrated health datasets.

What our partners have said about us

I am really impressed with the Cohorting as a Service (CaaS) team. Their deep understanding of both technical and programme needs make them an invaluable partner in our efforts to prevent tuberculosis nationally.
The Cohorting as a Service team have been an exceptional partner in delivering the eligible cohorts for the RSV programme for older adults. Their expertise, responsiveness, and deep understanding of clinical informatics have been invaluable throughout development and delivery.
CaaS demonstrated exceptional understanding of the technical differences between the legacy SDRS/PI (Screening Data Reporting System / Population Index) feed and Cohort Manager, which was critical to the success of the project. A truly outstanding contribution.

Data sets we use

When creating a cohort, data sets are used to identify specific groups of individuals based on their health information. This helps in evaluating health risks and improving their care. Depending on the individual characteristics needed for your cohorts, we can access a range of data sets, Learn about some of the data sets that we have previously used:

National usage policy

CaaS provides authorised NHS programmes access to identified individuals' information for improving direct care through cohorting.   

Roadmap

Find out what we're working on now and what we plan to do in the future:

View the Cohorting as a Service roadmap (opens in a new window).

Status, service level and current usage

This service is live.

This is a silver service, which means it's available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year and supported from 8am to 6pm, Monday to Friday excluding bank holidays.

Contact us

The following table shows how to contact us about the service.

Enquiry Point of contact

Senior Responsible Officer

Stephen Koch

Email: [email protected]

Service owner

Joe Gamble

Email: [email protected]

Last edited: 20 April 2026 3:29 pm