Digital System Support

The DSS team works across 2 complementary domains:

Level 1: Intervention support for critical issues in live services, including stabilisation following major incidents, upgrades, and go-live events.

Level 2: Structured assurance and specialist advisory support for complex digital transformation programmes, for example, Electronic Patient Record (EPR) implementations.

When planning digital activity or if an NHS trust is experiencing challenges during a digital deployment, the trust can ask for advice and guidance from Subject Matter Experts (SMEs). SME support covers a range of subjects including data migration, change management, testing, service management and clinical engagement.  

DSS also offers trusts access to lessons learned from other deployments to help them in deploying solutions.  

Trusts receiving support remain accountable for delivery, however, having access to national NHS SME capabilities, experience and learning increases the chances of safe and successful deployment. DSS works closely with trusts and their clinical and technical teams to provide specialist advice and guidance in areas that can be difficult for trusts to find.

DSS provides consistent, evidence-based assurance across the national portfolio, completing more than 100 formal assurance reviews and supporting 50+ EPR go-lives across acute, community, and mental health settings. These engagements covered both phased and big-bang deployment approaches, often within highly constrained operational environments.

The DSS assurance methodology has evolved iteratively through this delivery experience and has been continuously refined using insights gathered from multiple trust engagements, enabling increasing consistency in identifying both success factors and delivery risks.

Each review is calibrated to reflect:

• the maturity and complexity of the trust and its programme governance
• the scale and deployment model of the EPR implementation
• the degree of complexity in data migration, system convergence, and interoperability
• the level of technical debt and legacy system dependency
• local operational pressures, workforce constraints, and organisational readiness

A defining feature of DSS assurance is its reliance on multi-disciplinary review teams comprising SMEs with direct, lived experience of NHS EPR delivery. This ensures that findings and recommendations are:

• grounded in delivery reality, rather than theoretical best practice
• evidence-led, drawing on artefacts, programme documentation, and stakeholder interviews
• actionable, with clear recommendations linked to known risks and delivery patterns observed across the national portfolio