The health service is suffering from a lack of comparable information on the four nations of the UK, researchers have claimed.

A King's Fund and London School of Economics study published in the British Medical Journal on Friday reported an "alarming" lack of equivalent data.

The Department of Health in England, devolved administrations in Scotland and Wales and the Northern Ireland Office, which runs the NHS in Ulster in the absence of an assembly, are failing to learn valuable lessons from each other as a result, the researchers said.

Data on measures such as waiting times and spending per person is gathered in different ways in each nation, meaning that accurate comparisons are impossible.

"There is a major health care experiment taking place at the moment with all four home nations adopting very different approaches to delivering healthcare," King's Fund policy director Jennifer Dixon said.

"This has produced mixed results with England performing better in areas such as waiting times largely as a result of extra money, targets, tough performance management and probably the contestability of clinical services.

"With devolution came an opportunity to learn the lessons from these different approaches, but a worrying lack of information has made this virtually impossible.

"Given the billions spent on healthcare, it is alarming that we lack the reliable data we need to make meaningful comparisons of NHS performance across the four nations of the UK.

"Taxpayers across the UK cannot tell whether their money is being better used in England, Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland."