Building healthcare software - general practice

This guide explains how to build software for GP practices within the NHS in England. 

It is a non-technical guide, aimed at people building healthcare software, including: 

• product owners
• architects
• business analysts
• delivery managers
• software engineers

It covers the following topics: 

• the commercial framework for GP software
• the capabilities you need to include
• integrating with national services, APIs and standards
• the software delivery process
• getting started

This guide is part of our series of domain-specific guides on building healthcare software. 

For more context, also see our introduction to healthcare technology. 

To supply GP software to the NHS in England, you must be registered on the GP IT Futures commercial framework.

For more details, see Digital Services for Integrated Care.

To supply GP software to the NHS in England, you must include certain capabilities and standards within your software.

For more details, see our Digital Care Services (DCS) Capabilities and Standards.

To deliver the required capabilities within your GP software, you'll need to integrate with various national services.

For more details, see GP software - integrating with national services.

How you deliver your software is up to you. But there are some important things you need to plan in when building software for the NHS in England, such as clinical safety, security and information governance. 

For more details, read our introduction to healthcare technology. 

To get started with building your software and using our API services and standards, see getting started.