Delivering digital services for NHS Test and Trace

We delivered a digital solution for Lateral Flow Tests (LFTs) on 28 October 2020, enabling decentralised use of these tests by organisations such as local authorities, universities and care homes.  

These devices provide rapid results on COVID-19 status in community settings and are an important part of the NHS Test and Trace strategy to significantly increase asymptomatic testing capacity.

The new digital capability supports the use of LFTs in professional settings, linking the subject to a lateral flow device and capturing test results for onward communication to the person who was tested, along with downstream systems (contact tracing services and systems for national reporting).

Development is underway on capabilities to support the use of LFTs in non-professional settings, including Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven visual readings of results.

We continued work to scale the testing infrastructure to support rapidly increasing testing volumes. This includes a number of infrastructure upgrades, architecture enhancements and process improvements.

We expanded monitoring of live services to ensure that testing systems remain performant as volumes continue to increase (for example, through enhanced monitoring and alerting for each step of the booking to result process).

We delivered a new capability on 19 November 2020 to create accounts linked to NHS Login.

NHS Login enables patients to securely access digital health services via a single login. This linkage will streamline registration for individuals who need to be tested multiple times (such as key workers in asymptomatic surveillance programmes).

We're developing solutions to enable the roll-out of mobile testing laboratory units to support point of care testing in response to outbreaks (this is currently in pilot).

We delivered a public dashboard on 12 November 2020 that shows the number of positive coronavirus cases confirmed by a lab test with the numbers of patients triaged for coronavirus by 111 and 111 online.  

The coronavirus in your area dashboard provides the ability to view local information by entering a postcode in England and selecting the distance around the postcode to be displayed.

Capacity has been rapidly scaled to enable 30 additional NHS Test and Trace systems to be onboarded by the end of March 2021.

We are continuing to mature CDOC’s capabilities to ensure it remains threat lead and threat relevant. Since June, around 5,000 alerts have been triaged.

We continued to provide protective monitoring and active cyber support for the contact tracing app since the national launch on 24 September 2020.

Following the successful delivery of the design and procurement for the strategic solution for trace, a Salesforce-centric contact tracing system, we transitioned the delivery of the programme to NHS Test and Trace.