About our digital services

We provide a variety of national digital services to support health and care within the NHS in England.

We have over a hundred digital services, and they vary greatly in terms of:

• the type of service they are
• the NHS business function they support
• the care settings they can be used in

This page explains the different types of service and how to discover and learn about them.

All our digital services are listed in our service catalogue.

The service catalogue includes features to help you find the right digital service.

Use the filters in the left hand navigation to find services based on their service type, function, care setting and more.

Use in-page search to find services based on keywords, for example ‘NHS number’.

Our service catalogue includes a few different types of entry, as explained below.

An individual service:

• helps a user achieve an outcome
• usually has a single service owner

Services typically consist of:

• digital (IT) assets - sometimes called products or sub-services
• people - for example to run the service or manage onboarding

As you might expect, most of our services are digitally driven, but a few of them are primarily human-powered.

Some of our services are 'back-end' services that can only be accessed by other IT systems via APIs or other system-to-system interfaces.

See all individual services.

A service group is a set of related services, such as screening services.

The services within the group are usually also listed individually within the catalogue.

See all service groups.

A programme is a team of people that is delivering some kind of change to the health and social care system in England.

We only include a programme in the catalogue if it is delivering change directly to the broader health and social care system. If a programme is delivering a new national service, we include the service in the catalogue, not the programme.

See all programmes.

Our digital services support a wide variety of NHS business functions.

These are digital services that support the prevention, investigation and treatment of illness and the alleviation of suffering. They might be used by health and care workers or directly by patients.

Direct care has sub-categories, including:

• patient information and demographics
• care records
• medications and prescriptions
• appointments, bookings and referrals

See all direct care services.

These are digital services that support the prevention of illness and suffering in the whole population, including:

• cohorting
• screening
• vaccination

See all population health and proactive care services.

These are digital services that support the monitoring of health and care operations and services to see how they could be more efficient or productive.

The users are health and care workers and other arms length bodies such as the Care Quality Commission. It might include access to weekly or hourly data updates (depending on criticality of action).

See all planning, oversight and service improvement services.

Data-driven research and innovation generates new knowledge that can improve health outcomes for patients. This can be through developing AI algorithms to support decision making; planning and delivering clinical trials or epidemiological studies; translational research, and analysis of real-world data for monitoring of safety and efficacy of interventions, systems or processes. This leads to improved population health, reduced health inequality and positive economic impact.

The users are academics, clinical researchers, medical research charities, regulators and industry, and can require access to near-real time data that may be either identifiable or de-identified.

See all research and innovation services.

These are services that can help NHS organisations improve their digital maturity.

The users are digital leaders and delivery teams across the NHS.

See all digital transformation services.

These are generally ‘platform’ services that underpin other digital services or provide general productivity tools, such as:

• NHSmail
• Health and Social Cate Network
• Cyber and data security
• API platform

See all core infrastructure and productivity tools services.

Many of our digital services are targeted at specific care settings.

In the service catalogue, we only tag services with a care setting if they are targeted specifically at that care setting. We don't tag care settings for general services that are used across all care settings, such as the Personal Demographics Service or the Organisation Data Service.

See all general practice services.

See all secondary care services.

See all urgent and emergency care services.

For help and support on a specific service, see the ‘Contact us’ section on the relevant service page.

The following services are specifically targeted at helping NHS digital leaders with their digital transformation activities.

For general guidance on integrating with our APIs and services, visit our developer and integration hub.

For further help, see Help and support building healthcare software.