New NHS Choices open to SMEs

The successor to NHS Choices will not be outsourced, but run in-house with help from a number of small and medium-sized enterprises, EHI has learned.

A beta version of the new NHS Choices website is on show at the Health and Social Care Innovation Expo in Manchester this week.

Previously called the Integrated Customer Service Platform and now called the Health and Social Care Digital Service, the "daughter of NHS Choices" aims to be the ‘digital front door’ to the NHS.

NHS Choices staff were transferred to the Health and Social Care Information Centre after the Cabinet Office blocked the renewal of Capita's contract to run the service early last year. Around 120 staff continue to run the site.

The plan, outlined in a paper to the Information Services Commissioning Group last July, was for the various parts of the new NHS Choices to go back out to tender from April 2014.

However, NHS England's director of customer relations John Coulthard told EHI the service would not be put out to tender, but run in-house using a number of SMEs.

He said that while the contract was with Capita for seven years, the criticism was that the service did not sufficiently evolve. 

"The question is not whether or not we outsource, but how much of the spend on digital services encourages or is spent with other UK SMEs.

“It used to be the case that a big chunk of that spend was with one company, Capita, but we're increasingly going to spread that across the UK Plc," said Coulthard. 

Four years ago, running NHS Choices cost around £45m in a year. That is now down to around £18m and is expected to decrease further to around £12m.

Coulthard explained that NHS England has been working hard to ensure SMEs know about its plans for NHS Choices and how to get involved.

He argued it has "done a pretty good job" at this and it will continue to engage. Some smaller contracts that are part of the NHS Choices spend have already been awarded to SMEs and others are expected.

Coulthard went on to describe the Health and Social Care Digital Service as the collective noun for around 80 online services, both patient-facing and professional-facing.

The intent is to make NHS Choices more patient-centric and focused on patient needs, but there are no current plans to re-brand the site. 

"At the heart of the beta version is a different mindset, which is inclusive not exclusive, designed to be centred around individuals and their needs," he said. "Two years ago Choices didn't really have a mobile offer; today I would say we are almost there."

NHS England head of digital experience and strategy, Arif Govani, said the organisation is doing a significant round of user research surveys and testing in order to collate a wide range of feedback on the beta site.

The beta version is live and shows off two new features; one is the GP choice tool which allows patients to enter their postcode to find a local GP, with information then displayed showing their list size, number of GPs and star rating.

Govani said this also allows patients to dig deeper to search for practices that have a number of patients with a certain condition or other preferences. 

The second is a new mobile-friendly version of the urgent care finder, which takes advantage of location tools to show patients on their phones where a nearest service is and how to get there.

Underpinning the beta version is a set of open application programme interfaces that allow companies to access and present the data held within the tool to patients in different ways.

"We ask the users what is it you want and then create, test and improve; that's the mindset we want to adopt," said Govani.