Building healthcare software - acute, community and mental health care

This guide explains how to build software that deals with electronic patient records (EPRs) within the NHS in England. 

It is a non-technical guide, aimed at people building healthcare software, including: 

• product owners
• architects
• business analysts
• delivery managers
• software engineers

It covers the following topics: 

• what EPRs are
• the commercial framework for EPR software
• the capabilities you need to include
• integrating with national services
• the software delivery process
• getting started

This guide is part of our series of domain-specific guides on building healthcare software. 

For more context, also see our introduction to healthcare technology. 

Acute care, community health care and mental health care are all types of secondary care: 

• acute care is where a patient receives active, short term care for a condition, and usually takes place in a hospital 
• community health care, as the name implies, takes place outside of a hospital setting, either at the patient’s home or in a care setting close to their home 
• mental health care deals with emotional, psychological, and social well-being, as well as learning disabilities, and takes place in a variety of care settings 

We have included all three care types in a single guide because their software needs are very similar. 

We refer to the software used in these care settings as electronic patient record (EPR) software. 

EPR software consists of several 'modules', including: 

• admissions and transfer of care - sometimes called the patient administration system (PAS) module 
• storage and management of records, assessments, and plans 
• diagnostics management 
• ordering and management of medicines 
• decision support 
• remote and assistive care 
• asset and resource management, including staff and beds 
• business and clinical insight 

An EPR software product might be: 

• ‘enterprise-wide’ - covering all or most modules 
• specialist - covering a specific module 

A given care organisation might therefore purchase a single enterprise-wide EPR software product from a single supplier, or they might adopt a 'best of breed' approach, buying different modules from different suppliers. Or, they might build all or part of their EPR software in-house. 

Not all EPR software modules apply to all care settings. For example, bed management is not needed for community health care. 

Also, not all secondary care organisations are at the same level of ‘digital maturity’. At the time of writing, NHS England is pushing to improve digital maturity via the frontline digitisation programme.

To supply EPR software to the NHS in England, you must be registered on the Health Systems Support Framework (HSSF). 

For more details, see the HSSF accredited supplier list. 

To supply EPR software to the NHS in England, you must meet certain capabilities and standards within your software. These are detailed in the frontline digitisation minimum digital foundation (MDF) - login required. 

For more details, see our EPR core requirements map.

To deliver the required capabilities within your EPR software, you'll need to integrate with various national services. 

For more details, see Electronic patient records - integrating with national services. 

How you deliver your software is up to you. But there are some important things you need to plan in when building software for the NHS in England, such as clinical safety, security and information governance. 

For more details, read our introduction to healthcare technology. 

To get started with building your software and using our API services and standards, see getting started.