Digital Health Guide

Digital Health Guide

A practical handbook of best practices for delivering digital services in health and social care organizations#

This book is written for the people who lead and run digital delivery in health and care: chief executives and senior leaders, directors of digital and transformation, product and delivery leads, clinical and care professionals moving into digital roles, program and portfolio managers, and the operational managers who make services work every day. Its center of gravity is the UK's National Health Service (NHS) and social care system, but its principles transfer to any publicly-accountable, safety-critical, partnership-dependent health organization anywhere.

Translations: العربية, বাংলা, Cymraeg, Deutsch, English, Español, Français, हिन्दी, Bahasa Indonesia, 日本語, 한국어, Русский, 中文

The premise is simple: in health and care, how you work is a clinical-safety, equity, and public-trust issue, not merely an efficiency one. Good ways of working get safe, equitable services to people faster and waste less public money. Poor ones cause harm. This book collects the best available practice — from the NHS and GOV.UK service standards, from portfolio, program and product disciplines, from change and improvement science, and from the health-and-care workforce evidence base — into one coherent operating playbook.

How to use this guide#

The topics are ordered but self-contained; each ends with a maturity model and a checklist so you can assess where you are and decide what to do next. Read Part I first to fix the vocabulary and the non-negotiables — safety, regulation, data, ethics, and inclusion — then jump to whichever part answers your current problem.

Contents#

What's in every topic#

Each topic follows the same structure so you can navigate and self-assess consistently: a one-sentence thesis; why it matters in health and care; core concepts (with Wikipedia links for further reading); numbered best practices; exactly six questions to discuss with your team; a worked health & care example; four sector lenses applying the topic to a Startup, a Small business, an Enterprise, and a Government body; common failure modes; a five-level maturity model; an actionable checklist; key sources; and full references. The authoring rules live in the style guide; the canonical specification lives in spec/index.md.

This handbook cites public, verifiable sources throughout: the NHS Digital Service Manual and Service Standard, the GOV.UK Service Manual and Design System, NICE's Evidence Standards Framework for Digital Health Technologies, the MHRA, CQC and DTAC, the clinical risk-management standards DCB0129/0160, the Caldicott Principles and UK data-protection law, HM Treasury's Green Book and Five Case Model, Team Topologies, MSP / PRINCE2 / MoP, Kotter and Prosci ADKAR, OKRs (Doerr), the Model for Improvement, the COM-B behavior-change model, the WHO global strategy on digital health, the Digitising Social Care program, and the health-and-care workforce strategy evidence base (including HEIW and Social Care Wales, A Healthier Wales: Our Workforce Strategy for Health and Social Care).