NHS Digital

NHS Digital’s experts explain how we are using technology and data to improve health and care.

NHS Digital Tech Talk

NHS Digital’s experts explain how we are using technology and data to improve health and care.

How we stealthily migrated the COVID-19 National Testing Service

At the height of the pandemic, NHS Digital took the decision to migrate the COVID-19 National Testing Service to a new platform. Mark Byrne, Head of Technology, explains how the team succeeded in doing this while processing about 1 million test results per day – without anyone really noticing.

Improving access to our API developer hub

Sam Perera, API Delivery Manager at NHS Digital, explains how we are making it easiers to use our APIs.

5 ways to get real feedback from software developers

Mick Schonhut, Technical Writer at NHS Digital, explains how we put user needs at the centre of our API documentation.

What happens when we ‘sunset’ our APIs?

Dr Munish Jokhani, Assurance Lead for API Management at NHS Digital explains how we retire our APIs and how developers can get involved in the process.

Dealing with our Glastonbury

Rob Sinclair, Lead Architect for the NHS website, gives a behind-the-scenes glimpse of how the National Booking Service for COVID-19 vaccinations is designed to deal with major peaks in demand.

Catching patients before COVID-19 bites

Oximetry @home allows COVID-19 patients to stay at home and get the care they need safely. Jonathan Telfer, Senior Technical Architect at NHS Digital, explains the approach and the data architecture behind it.

The tech behind the jab

Richard McEwan, Lead Technical Architect, explains the infrastructure behind one of the world’s largest national COVID-19 vaccination programmes and how it has helped over 35 million people and counting get their life-saving jabs.

Finding the vulnerable before COVID does

When the University of Oxford developed a model to predict those at higher risk of dying from COVID-19, we had a challenge: to securely integrate this risk assessment tool into our data systems to identify exactly who these people were. Lee Gathercole, Technical Architect, explains how we did it.

Lessons from the coalface of API-first design

Our ‘API-first’ approach is making it easier for developers, suppliers and partners to connect to our platforms and services. Brian Diggle, Technical Architect at NHS Digital, gives a behind-the-scenes look at how this approach works in practice.

Dr Seuss and engineering in a pandemic

Andrew Blundell, Head of Software Engineering in NHS Digital’s Product Development directorate, explains why we must split apart large systems into smaller, loosely coupled components to cope with a wild and unpredictable world – and how the NHS Digital software engineering quality framework helps us.

5 key themes for the future of the NHS Spine

Earlier this year, we talked to our strategic partners across the public and private sectors about how we can evolve our Spine platform to meet the needs of a future health and care system. Ash Raines, Head of Delivery for the Platforms Directorate, shares the key themes and insights we’ve learned.

How we created the Shielded Patient List

Mark Reynolds, Chief Technology Officer at NHS Digital, explains the architecture behind the NHS Shielded Patient List, which is helping to protect the most vulnerable members of society during the coronavirus pandemic.

Making it easier to connect to our platforms and services

Tony Heap, Lead Product Owner for API Management at NHS Digital, explains how our new API Platform will create more opportunities to improve digital health and care services

Creating a self isolation note in response to the pandemic

Setting up a way to quickly obtain a self isolation note was a key step to support the coronavirus (COVID-19) response. This service enables people who were suffering symptoms or who were living with someone suffering symptoms to present a note to their employer as evidence that they needed to stay at home.

COVID-19 data dashboards: From prototypes to a solution serving thousands in weeks

Alistair Bullward, Product Owner for Open Data and Data Visualisation, explains how we moved swiftly to provide a robust, mature data service to help with the coronavirus response.