However, there’s a bewildering number of mobile apps – over 230,000 – that claim to offer benefit to personal health and wellbeing. While the public is largely eager and willing to embrace these new technologies, healthcare professionals have struggled to differentiate between the highly effective, clinically proven apps and the countless others. As a result, they are reluctant to recommend them to patients; a problem that must be solved in order to achieve the NIB’s cost saving objectives for the NHS.

The answer is to develop a library of health apps endorsed by the NHS to give clinicians confidence and drive adoption. IE Digital was appointed by PHE to carry out the digital consultancy and systems analysis needed to develop a robust endorsement system.

It begins with Self Assessment by the app developer/provider to ensure that the app meets a set of key criteria. The app then progresses onto Community Assessment, which enables peer reviewers from the ‘expert community’ to validate and challenge apps, and provide feedback for improvement.

Once the app has passed these stages they’ll move onto a period of business case development and a review by NICE for cost and effectiveness. 

The Self Assessment project was broken into stages, each of which follows the typical Discovery–Alpha–Beta–Live phases in line with Government Digital Service (GDS) Design Principles.

For the discovery phase, we held co-creation workshops with PHE and key project stakeholders including MHRA, HSCIC, NHS England & NICE to determine the scoring criteria involved in assessing the quality of a health app. 

We took an agile approach and built a rapid prototype in WordPress to test ideas quickly in a practical environment. The prototype was user tested to obtain feedback on the workflow, signposting and messaging aspects of the system. This ‘alpha’ product has also been demonstrated at health sector conferences to gain broader industry feedback.

For the beta product, we built a bespoke front end using Laravel, with a Drupal back end for the form creation and user management features and Zoho reports for dashboard reporting. Once the beta product was complete and ready for testing, IE Digital supported and trained PHE to get up and running.

The code and was passed over to PHE’s servers for management by the in house team, with everything fully documented.

We assembled a team of in-house domain experts alongside IE Digital’s content designers to define the different audiences and their needs. We then agreed a narrative for each audience and planned the content, mapping each audience to the relevant source data and findings.

We then entered the content production and review phase, to create a complete set of packaged content – in the gov.uk markdown format and in line with its content design guidance – ready for publication on gov.uk and subsequent publicity.

The manual helps app developers, commissioners and independent assessors throughout the app evaluation process, and provides set of criteria that must be met and evidenced to ensure that apps meet the required standards for clinical safety, security, usability, etc. It will stimulate activity and ensure a flow of safe apps into the health service – those of benefit to public health and/or those that bring efficiencies and cost savings to the NHS.

See the service manual on .gov.uk.