NHS Digital has unveiled a toolkit for integrating NHS login with digital healthcare services.
It is aiming to encourage a ‘self-service’ approach to the integrations to support a large number of services, following the more tightly regulated regime for the early round of integrations.
Rebecca Jarrat, lead delivery manager at NHS Digital, outlined the move in a blogpost, saying the toolkit is now open to all that meet its criteria and that it wants to receive applications from as many services as possible.
NHS login is a mechanism for patients to log into their records for specific healthcare services. According to the most recent numbers it was being used for 14 services, including the NHS App and the NHS e-Referrals service, along with several developed by independent parties.
The integration for these had been developed by a close collaboration between their creators and NHS Digital, but it wants to streamline the process and give them more freedom to develop the integrations under their own steam.
Sandpit step
Jarratt said that testing the new integrations in a sandpit – a copy of the live production code environment – has been a crucial step, and NHS Digital will require developers to connect and explore the relevant login journeys in it before the integration begins. It is also requiring them to join the developer Slack channel.
“The challenge now is to help people who are making great digital tools bring the benefits of NHS login to their users,” Jarratt said.
“Any digital health service that meets the eligibility requirements can now work towards and achieve NHS login integration. We want to integrate as many digital services as possible, as quickly as possible – but we need to do this in a safe and controlled way.”
Image from NHS Digital, Open Government Licence v3.0
