Designing a directory of nationally recognised data standards in the NHS
Snapshot
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Designing a whole service
I worked on the service from discovery to live and was responsible for developing, testing and iterating content across the entire service
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Familiarising users with new concepts
I created a service that users found intuitive despite interoperability still being a relatively unknown term amongst NHS users at the time.
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Meeting quality standards
I presented at two assessments against the Government Service Standard, helping the team to pass both first time.
Laying the foundations for a joined up health service
In 2021, Marvell Consulting won a contract with NHSX, NHS England’s transformation arm, to carry out a discovery into a service that would allow health and social care users to find nationally approved data standards. This was a complex space. The ultimate purpose of the service was to help make interoperability a reality in the NHS but that would only be possible if healthcare settings were aligning to nationally recognised standards in how they were formatting their data, both at the front-end where the data was being collected, and in back-end systems.
Over a year, I worked with a multidisciplinary team of researchers, developers and interaction designers to understand this space, the users and their needs. This was a complex user group as it comprised both developers who needed approved data standards to build healthcare systems as well as clinical and administrative staff who were responsible for collecting data from patients. This created some unique language challenges as not everyone understood what the term interoperability meant, what data standards were for or why they were important.
During the alpha phase, I developed content for a prototype service taking particular care to focus on the service names and tagline which I knew would be important to get right. I carried out a naming workshop with stakeholders to generate ideas and ensure stakeholders felt engaged and consulted in this critical piece of content work.
We settled on changing the working name of the service from ‘The NHS Interoperability Standards Portal’ to ‘The NHS Data Standards Directory’ to reflect the fact that ‘data standards’ was become a more widely known term amongst users. The shift from ‘portal’ to ‘directory’ was to better communicate that the service would not hold the standards themselves but was a signposting service.
I was also responsible for content development for the rest of the service including categorising the different types of data standard, defining metadata that helped users understand key details of a data standard at a glance and defining key terms by aligning to international and national bodies to drive consistency. Over multiple cycles, I tested variations of the content, continuously refining it in response to user feedback.
The service passed a successful government beta assessment in November 2022 and went live.
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