NHS Digital Standards Compliance Guide

As the public sector continues its journey into the digital age, staying on top of NHS Digital Standards is essential. These standards play a big role in safeguarding patient data, building public trust, and making sure health information can move smoothly between systems and care providers.

For healthcare organisations, suppliers, and partners, understanding what’s required can feel overwhelming. That’s why we’ve put together this easy-to-follow guide. We’ll walk you through the key NHS Digital Standards, explain what they mean in practice, and share key steps to help you stay compliant while embracing digital transformation with confidence.

 

What are NHS Digital Standards?

NHS Digital Standards are a collection of guidelines and requirements that aim to ensure any digital technologies and services used within the NHS are safe and effective for staff and patients. These standards address several key areas, such as data protection, accessibility, usability, clinical safety, and interoperability. They provide healthcare organisations with minimum baseline standards to adhere to when finding and assessing digital health tools to implement into their processes. 

 

Why are these standards important?

These digital standards are essential for healthcare organisations to maintain high standards of care and protect patients. Other reasons why they are important include:

• Connected care – NHS Digital Standards encourages interoperability between different providers through secure data sharing. This enables more coordinated care and better communication to provide the right treatment for patients.
• Patient experience – giving patients more control of their healthcare data has been an important step for the NHS. A strong focus on usability and accessibility ensures digital tools are user-friendly for patients and healthcare professionals.
• Data protection – digital standards are essential in protecting sensitive patient details and maintaining compliance with data protection requirements like GDPR.
  

 

What is included in NHS Digital Standards?

NHS Digital Standards set clear expectations for any technology used in the health and care system. 

Clinical risk management

There are two NHS Digital Standards for clinical risk:

DCB0129 – for technology developers

DCB0160 – for adopters (organisations implementing the tech)

Both sides must assess potential risks and take steps to ensure patient safety. Without meeting these standards, a technology can’t be approved for use within NHS services.

For developers, complying with DCB0129 means carrying out a full clinical risk assessment, documenting how those risks are managed, and sharing the results with the adopting organisation.

 

Digital Technology Assessment Criteria (DTAC)

DTAC establishes baseline assessment requirements for digital health technologies, bringing together legislation and good practice in clinical safety, data protection, technical security and more areas. 

It is designed to be used by healthcare organisations to assess suppliers at the procurement stage or due diligence process. To ensure the digital technologies meet the minimum standards.

 

Service and data standards

The NHS service standard aims to help digital teams meet the various needs of health service users and navigate the complexities of providing digital services in healthcare. This standard is an accompaniment to the GOV service standard, with ‌17 points for health teams to meet. Examples of these points include supporting a culture of care and making services clinically safe and interoperable. 

Information standards in healthcare are legal requirements that ensure data can be governed and shared across the sector. These standards precisely define how to collect, share, and handle data, ensuring secure and consistent exchange. They cover:

• Data – the structure and type collected, e.g., patient demographics
• Technical – how systems communicate with each other
• Data governance – policies and procedures for ethical and secure data management

 

Accessibility and internet first

Digital accessibility standards help ensure that everyone, whether staff or patients, can use and benefit from healthcare information systems, no matter their abilities or challenges.

These standards lay out clear guidelines for making websites, apps, and digital services usable by all. That means thinking about how information is displayed, how users interact with technology, and making sure people with impairments or disabilities aren’t left behind.

NHS Digital implemented the Internet First policy in 2018 with the purpose of ensuring all new external services are internet-facing by default and for existing services to be updated as soon as possible. The internet is a powerful and accessible tool; healthcare settings need to utilise this to improve the standard of care across the country.

By making digital services available over the internet, healthcare professionals can work more flexibly from different locations. Therefore, this leads to reduced costs and more streamlined operations for many organisations, especially smaller providers.

 

5 steps to ensure NHS Digital standards compliance

Meeting NHS Digital Standards requires following best practices for data protection, system compatibility, cybersecurity, and connecting systems. These standards are essential for anyone working with NHS systems, patient data, or digital services.

Familiarise yourself with NHS Digital Standards

It’s easy to undervalue the importance of reading and closely following all amendments and updates to standards and requirements. Healthcare organisations and providers should understand the standards in detail that apply to their industry and processes. 

Identifying relevant standards based on your role is also important, such as if you’re a provider, developer, or partner. Different standards may apply depending on this, as we explored earlier with DCB0129, a standard designed for digital technology developers.

 

Complete a compliance gap analysis

Analyse your operations and workflows to identify where your organisation is meeting NHS Digital Standards and any areas where it may be falling short. You should review areas like secure system design, authentication and access control, data storage and processing, and use of standard APIs. 

Carrying out an analysis like this can be extremely beneficial. You may not be fully compliant with the digital standards without knowing, which could lead to negative repercussions if not resolved.

 

Implement key technical standards

A core part of NHS Digital Standards compliance is technical alignment, meaning your systems, platforms, and services must meet national guidelines for data structure, clinical coding, and interoperability. This is particularly relevant for health tech vendors, EHR developers, system integrators, and digital service providers.

 

Establish information governance and cybersecurity controls

Having high-quality information governance and NHS cybersecurity controls in place is an important way to maintain compliance with Digital Standards. You can achieve this by putting in place policies and procedures that align with relevant frameworks. For example, GDPR, the Data Protection Act 2018 and Cyber Essentials Plus. 

Adhering to these frameworks ensures you have robust systems and processes in place to protect sensitive data, which results in better compliance with NHS Digital Standards. Healthcare organisations need to ensure that any external digital system they use maintains the same high standards of data security and complies with these frameworks. 

As a leading e-signature provider in the UK, E-Sign is compliant with many industry-specific regulations and holds several accreditations that demonstrate our commitment to data security and privacy. 

 

Train staff and technical teams

Everyone on your team, from developers to admin staff, should be provided with sufficient training when it comes to digital standards and using new systems. Providing a better understanding of NHS Digital Standard requirements to staff will minimise the risk of errors and non-compliance and encourage greater accuracy overall. When providing staff training, you may want to cover the following topics:

• Information sharing protocols
• Secure coding practices
• Access controls
• Handling patient-identifiable data

 

Conclusion

Achieving and maintaining compliance with NHS Digital Standards is essential for any modern healthcare organisation and health tech companies. By aligning your processes with relevant technical and governance frameworks, you demonstrate that your organisation has the capabilities to securely handle sensitive data, achieve seamless interoperability, and ensure simple accessibility for staff and patients. 

If your healthcare organisation is looking for a streamlined and cost-effective way to manage document workflows and reduce paper, E-Sign can help. Contact us today to discuss your requirements. You can also try the platform for yourself at any time by registering for a no-obligation 14-day free trial.