Supplier guidance

When you are designing Digital Services to be available over the public internet in line with Internet First policy, there are standards that must be met, and recommended standards that you should meet and that may be specified for by your commissioning organisation. View our technical guidance for more information.

Building or remediating a Digital Service to be available over the public internet will involve the following steps.

If you're working on remediating an existing service, you first need to:

• understand how the service is currently hosted and accessed
• determine how the users currently authenticate, for example using a VPN or with smartcards

As you move on to designing either the remediation activity or the new service, you will need to:

• understand the requirements of your user community
• understand your dependencies on Digital Services that NHS Digital provides, for example the NHS Spine
• work with the organisations that commission or use your services to determine network sizing requirements
• build an implementation plan that details how you will build the new service, or remediate the existing service, in line with technical standards, including security standards
• communicate your plan and key milestones to your user and stakeholder community, so that they can factor in changes to their Internet First and other business planning

Your implementation plan should cover the steps you will take to develop your Internet First service from development to final user deployment. 

It should include how you will test and assure your product, particularly in terms of clinical safety and data security.