Tag Archive for: NHS Digital

How we’re transforming our digital service catalogue

Thasmim Ali describes the changes we’ve made to our digital service catalogue to make it easier for our stakeholders to find out and understand what national digital services are available for NHS staff and organisations to use.

NHS England provides more than 100 national digital services for the NHS. They’re listed in the service catalogue on the NHS England Digital website.

However, after speaking with digital leaders across the system, our ‘Who Does What’ programme team identified two important problems.

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We had to follow the data, not our users

Chiara Garattini and Kate Burn explain how working in our Data and Analytics sub-directorate has challenged the assumptions of our user-centred design team.

A big part of early work on projects typically involves helping our colleagues to focus a bit less on the characteristics of their products and the requirements of their internal processes, and to instead start by involving users to understand their needs.

Therefore, it's been interesting to work on projects that required our team to get deep into the weeds of the process in order to, ultimately, put the focus back on users. 

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One year on: The latest on our Secure Data Environment

Liz Gaffney, Head of NHS England's Secure Data Environment, reflects on the developments of the service one year on.

In January, Michael Chapman blogged about our ambitious plans for the NHS England Secure Data Environment (SDE), starting with migrating customers to the service, testing its capabilities and processes, and then scaling up the service to handle wider use.

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New choices for GP IT

As we prepare to bring new products and suppliers into the GP IT market, Dan Wintercross discusses the Tech Innovation Framework. 

The demand for primary care is increasing, with GP practices currently delivering more than 27 million appointments every month. It’s more important than ever to make sure they have the best digital tools to support them to do their job.

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Recruitment success puts spotlight on what we can do better

Our data-driven clinical trials service, NHS DigiTrials, is changing what is possible for researchers but there’s more to do, says our Head of Clinical Trials.

We’re seeing numbers coming out of the NHS DigiTrials’ recruitment service that would not have seemed possible 2 years ago.

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Multi-factor authentication: a silver cyber bullet?

Clinical informatics manager Chris Day says full implementation of multi-factor authentication is critical to local organisations’ cyber security.

Cyber security is about risk reduction and that can make it a difficult sell in the NHS.

Hard-pressed boards often want to know how much something is going to save them, but the cost of not implementing cyber security measures can only be calculated when their network or system is compromised.

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Multi-factor authentication: a silver cyber bullet?

Clinical informatics manager Chris Day says full implementation of multi-factor authentication is critical to local organisations’ cyber security.

Cyber security is about risk reduction and that can make it a difficult sell in the NHS.

Hard-pressed boards often want to know how much something is going to save them, but the cost of not implementing cyber security measures can only be calculated when their network or system is compromised.

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The invisible ecosystem that protects us

Alex Toft, Head of Technical Intervention in our Technology Live Services directorate, explains how the renewal of the NHS's public key infrastructure (PKI) over the coming months will lay the foundations for trusted identities and secure communications for the next generation.

Despite its mathematical origins stretching back to the 1960s, the collection of technologies and strong governance which constitute a modern public key infrastructure (PKI) remain as relevant today as they ever have been. Anybody using a computer will lever this technology on a constant basis, likely without ever knowing it. Ultimately it builds trust: trust of people, trust of systems, trust of software and trust of documents.

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What is inclusive design and why is it important?

Samuel Martin and Ellen Doyle have been leading the development of principles to help teams at NHS England design more inclusively. 

‘Inclusive design’ and 'accessibility' are often used interchangeably, but they are different things.  

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How we created a roadmap for the NHS website

James Higgott, Lead Product Manager for the NHS website, talks about how his team is using a comprehensive roadmap to help them focus on outcomes, not outputs.

We recently published an update to the roadmap for the NHS website (nhs.uk). This describes what we will (and won’t) do to meet user needs and organisational goals on the UK’s biggest health website.

Previously, the roadmap we used internally was more like a Gantt chart than a true roadmap. Each item had a start and an end date and a description of the output, not the outcome.

In March 2023, we made significant changes to how we created and presented the roadmap. This is how we did it.

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