Are you ‘DTAC ready’? SME Top tips

Have you heard about the Digital Technology Assessment Criteria for health and social care (DTAC) yet? It’s the new assessment criteria from NHSX to give staff, patients and citizens confidence that the digital health tools they use meet the relevant standards. Here CEO of Accelerator SME Concentric Health’s, Dafydd Loughran, shares his experience and top tips to become DTAC ready.

Suppliers: Let me guess, you’re bored of filling in the same but slightly different forms (DPIA’s etc) with subtly different questions at every NHS Trust before deployment.

NHS Trust teams: Tricky to tell what good looks like right? We’ve all had the relevant information hidden away in different nooks and crannies of our websites…or not at all.

As we all step forward in our digital maturity, let’s make our lives easier and make it easy to see what good looks like.

Here’s where NHSX’s Digital Technology Assessment Criteria comes in, or at least it’s another step along the journey. Whilst not perfect (it’s pretty light on evidence for effectiveness and it’s not entirely clear how it will play alongside NICE’s evidence standards framework for digital health technologies), it does bring together many of the key elements of what good should look like (a clear value proposition and use case, with demonstration of how technical, interoperability clinical safety and accessibility/usability standards are met).

It’s also not too onerous, and we’ll all have been asked the questions (or at least the vast majority of them) in different forms as part of previous deployments. Here’s how we at Concentric Health demonstrate meeting the DTAC, or as is being coined as a phrase, are ‘DTAC ready’: https://concentric.health/resources/dtac/

Are you surprised to see this publicly available? I’m not surprised that you’re surprised. But I want that surprise to be a thing of the past.

Suppliers: there is no need to hide. Be transparent. There is nothing in the DTAC that you should be hiding – it’s just good practice, just you going about your day meeting standards.

The flip side is that it’s very noticeable to NHS Trusts when you’re transparent. It’s just not what they’ve grown accustomed to over the past two decades. And it speaks volumes.

Want to see our clinical safety docs? Sure, here they are: https://concentric.health/resources/clinical-risk-management-system/

Want to see how we meet the relevant clinical standards for consent? Sure, here you go: https://concentric.health/resources/standards-and-guidelines-conformance/

Let’s make transparency the norm. Start with the DTAC. Normalise it and make it easy and suddenly you’ll never be asked to fill in some custom, slightly tweaked, local version of the DTAC.

We noticed a couple of things we weren’t doing that made sense to start doing as part of the process of completing a DTAC – for example we didn’t have a status page that users could go to, and our accessibility statement wasn’t as visible as it should have been. Good things to notice and put right.

Suppliers: If you haven’t got around to it yet, get ‘DTAC ready’ and start suggesting to NHS Trusts that you have it available and that most of their queries should be covered within one webpage.

NHS Trusts: Let’s embrace DTAC as a standard. Expect it. Expect it publicly. And let’s try not to fork into lots of little versions of it over the years to come as we’ve seen with other similar projects.

Thanks for reading and any questions say hello at daf@concentric.health

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Concentric Health is currently one of 20 digital health companies on the DigitalHealth.London Accelerator programme.

The DigitalHealth.London Accelerator is a collaborative programme funded by London’s three Academic Health Science Networks – UCL Partners, Imperial College Health Partners, and the Health Innovation Network, MedCity, CW+ and receives match funding from the European Regional Development Fund.