The Data Standards Directory - development update 3rd November 2022

Dear all, please find a link to the latest development weekly update highlighting the work we have delivered in the last week and what we intend to do next week.

This week we launched our new latest awaited feature, Future Standards. This part of the site allows you all to get advanced sight of standards that are in the process of being developed, likely to be mandatory but have not been approved yet.

(image from https://code.garron.us/css/BTTF_logo/index_interactive.htm)

We listened to our users and heard about the difficulties in having to get business cases signed off, plans into your roadmaps and upgrades analysed to move towards to a new or updated standard that is coming soon. By launching this feature, we are encouraging our partner standard developers to be as open as they can be as to when standards are going to be released, and crucially when they have to be complied with and implemented by.

To start with you can filter the results by care settings, to see standards more relevant to you.

This feature may be familiar to some of you who have participated in our user research. This is because we went out with prototypes to see how users felt about a design for a notification feature. After all, if a standard is coming soon and you want to keep an eye on it, it would be easier to subscribe then to constantly have to visit the site and see if the date has changed or information has been added?

Figure 1 - Prototype of the roadmap

We are looking forward to making this possible in the future, but first will have to solve a trickier problem about how standards are versioned and how we would communicate the way it has changed over time. Once we enhance our data model to store versions and the state of a standard at a point in time, we would hope to make this design come to life.

One of our tasks this week was exploring all the research to find #tags – the language our user participants used to describe standards and themselves. This is because we are looking to develop this language and assign to the standards we hold on the directory. This will be for many different purposes, but most importantly to ensure our users can find standards relevant to them. We will be talking soon about how this will be used to provide an experience that allows you to find standards in the ‘language’ you are used to.

Our focus on research next week is to recruit user participants to investigate how we can offer a social and collaborative experience on the site. It is important for us to know whether standards conversations should take place on our site as a service or whether we need to see whether we can bring conversations from across the internet about health and social care standards to the user.  After all, if we are all in the same room, there is a higher chance we won’t be left out of the conversation. Do you like to be social about standards? Then do get in touch if you would like to participate.

Please do continue to test out data.standards.nhs.uk and let us know any feedback we can use to plan further improvements or if you are interested in participating in research with us.

Many thanks,

Bharat ‘buh-rut’ Sharma (he/him)

Senior Product Manager of data.standards.nhs.uk - the ‘Standards Directory’

Standards and Interoperability Team england.interop.standards@nhs.net

Chief Technology Office 

NHS Transformation Directorate | NHS England