How Digital Technology Assessment Criteria (DTAC) works

Care commissioners and providers must ensure any digital health technology (DHT) products they use or recommend for use meet all national standards and requirements. When conducting assessment and assurance of products, care providers and commissioners should use a completed DTAC form provided by the manufacturer. Learn more about conducting a DTAC assessment.

DHT manufacturers must show their product meets DTAC’s minimum standards by keeping an up to date DTAC form and required supporting documents for each product version. Manufacturers should provide the DTAC form on request. If a different organisation (such as a reseller) supplies the product to the care provider, it must share completed DTAC documents, with manufacturer input if needed.

Manufacturers should provide the completed form and refrain from submitting incomplete forms or deleting sections and/or questions from the form. When a supplier’s service uses DHT products, they must ensure each product’s manufacturer provides a completed DTAC form for assessment.

Care providers and commissioners should request the DTAC form when acquiring a DHT. The form is used for due‑diligence assessment and risk management. 

Digital health technology (DHT) products are defined by the NICE definition described in the Evidence Standards Framework.

Commissioners or providers of health and social care services should apply DTAC to any DHT products they are considering to use. This applies to technologies they plan to use themselves or make available to those receiving care.

DHT products are software products (including software-as-a-service and web or mobile apps) that are designed to be used by care recipients, clinicians, or staff. They are designed to improve either health outcomes or the provision or management of health and care services.

They may be offered as a standalone product or for use alongside hardware products, but do not include electronic hardware devices or software embedded in hardware devices (for example, firmware).

While some of the requirements covered by DTAC may also apply to products that are not DHT products, DTAC is designed specifically for DHT products.

There may also be other standards and requirements that apply to specific categories of DHT products not covered in DTAC (for example, DHTs used as part of NHS Talking Therapies, or ambient voice technologies).

Providers and care commissioners should ensure that their governance approaches account for this and apply appropriate assurance where needed.

Care providers should accept the standard DTAC form published by NHS England and should not create their own amended versions covering the same requirements, as this creates additional barriers and delays to procurement activities.

Where care providers and commissioners have additional requirements beyond what is covered within DTAC, these should be included as supplemental requests to manufacturers but should not duplicate anything covered in DTAC documentation.

As of 24 February 2026, NHS England have introduced an updated DTAC form. Manufacturers and buying organisations should retire the previous version of the DTAC form and transition to using the updated form before 6 April 2026.

As part of the DTAC form, suppliers may be asked to complete and attach further documentation, such as a Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) or Pre-Acquisition Questionnaire (PAQ) form. As with the DTAC form itself, buying organisations should use the centrally produced standardised templates and avoid creating their own versions of these forms.

As part of reform work, NHS England is exploring the use of a centralised repository for hosting and maintaining DTAC documentation for individual products to further reduce overheads and drive standardisation.