Digital Capability for Health

Crown Commercial Service, as the Authority, has put in place an agreement for the provision of Digital Capability for Health for use by NHS Digital and other public sector health and social care bodies for the provision of digital outcomes and supporting services. The agreement was developed with NHS Digital as the Operator, who requires digital capability to meet specific needs of the health and social care sector. NHS Digital requires suppliers to invest in understanding their specific organisational needs and to bespoke delivery of their services to meet requirements. This framework has 12 suppliers with whom NHS Digital will develop strategic relationships over a period of time, to warrant up-front investment in framework level supplier agnostic competition, whilst maintaining effective and efficient competition at call-off. Building of closer strategic relationships will encourage the suppliers to improve and innovate on their delivery of services. This will be achieved through ongoing collaborative partnership or supplier relationship management activities based on feedback from call-off contracts and MI reports. Suppliers under the framework are required to provide the following Service Provisions: DevOps Services - support for ongoing live services Digital Definition Services - either separately or combined Extended Discovery and /or Alpha phases. Build and Transition Services - either separately combining Beta phase and/or Retirement phases (including transition to Live). It is anticipated that Live will be covered by an appropriate competition for DevOps Services. End-to-End Development Services - with the ability to combine the full set of agile phases of Discovery through to Live. Data Management (and Similar) Services - primarily targeted at building, enhancing and maintaining data assets, migrating data from one system to another and analysis and reporting from such data assets. Call-off competitions under this framework will follow NHS Digital’s standard governance processes for their requirements. There is no direct award call-off in this agreement. Typical digital development will follow Government Digital Service (GDS) life cycle: discovery, alpha, beta and so on, outlined in the government service design manual (https://www.gov.uk/service-manual). Suppliers will deliver work using GDS agile methodologies. The framework will address the evolving technical ‘stacks’ associated within the different pillars of NHS Digital, including: Platforms and infrastructure Product development Data services