Case study - Apply for Care ID in universities

Apply for Care ID is a simple and secure ID application enabling health and care staff, including students, to verify their identity without the need for a face-to-face meeting with a Registration Authority (RA).

Apply for Care ID enables health and care staff, including students, to verify their identity using a simple and secure app. The service can be used anytime, anywhere, providing a more efficient and convenient alternative to a face-to-face ID check. 

When an applicant’s identity has been verified, they can be given a Care ID authenticator, such as a smartcard, with the permissions to access the national systems, clinical data and patient information they need to fulfil their role.

Find out more information about the service, including videos.

While conducting research with the RA community, we recognised the challenge of verifying identities and issuing authenticators for large cohorts of students. 

To enable students to make the most of their placements and to best support their teams and patients when they graduate, they need to have access to the necessary national clinical information systems when they first enter their roles. 

This presents RAs with a real challenge as they have to verify each student's identity and get them the correct access so they can hit the ground running, in what is often a very short timeframe, significantly increasing workload pressure. 

Numerous universities, including Oxford University and East Anglia University, were involved in our pilot for Apply for Care ID. We conducted in-person testing of the product with the University of Birmingham, allowing us to expose issues and refine the process for future cohorts and get real time feedback from the students, RA’s and university staff.

To ensure the individual’s email address is credible, those using Apply for Care ID must have an NHS.net or a Care Identity Service (CIS) allow listed email address. We have included ‘.ac.uk’ on the allow list to ensure university cohorts can use the service.

A centralised team of NHS ID checkers review and approve the identity documents and the face scan of the student, automatically creating a profile in CIS. Once created, the RA is able to access the universally unique identifier (UUID) of the new CIS profile to print smartcards in batches and deliver them to the university.

We gradually built up the number of students invited to try the product and provided email templates and resources to the university to share to support students through the process. 

During the pilot, we successfully issued smart cards to over 700 students, without the need for face-to-face meetings with an RA. The pilot also confirmed that the service delivered many of the benefits we anticipated, including potentially saving hundreds of hours of journey time, and associated travel costs, to attend face-to-face meetings. 

The Apply for Care ID product has enabled a variety of students studying healthcare-related subjects to:

• check for themselves if they already have a Care Identity Service (CIS) profile
• take a photo of their own ID documents and face to prove their identity
• not have to worry about taking time out of their studies to go to a face-to-face appointment
• not have to pay for travel costs to meet with an RA in person

RA teams have had to conduct significantly fewer face-to-face checks and reduced the administrative burden associated with this activity both for their team and the associated university staff freeing them up to concentrate on other jobs.

It takes minutes to take and submit photos of documents and face, at any time and in any place, removing the need for travel.

Identities created through Apply for Care ID use the latest biometric technology and remove any ambiguity regarding the validity of those identities.

The RAs we worked with were assured that the student identities were verified to a Good Practice Guide (GPG) 45 ‘High’ standard. 

We are working with a range of organisations including Commissioning Support Units (CSUs), Integrated Care System (ICS) , county councils, hospices, pharmacies and ambulance services to continue to develop and improve Apply for Care ID.

In 2023, we’ll be developing:

• a digital address check feature, removing the need to capture an image of a physical or online proof of address document and requiring only one other form of photo ID
• improvements to smartcard photo capture
• automated ID checking

We now have approved applications from 13 universities across England and are keen to get more universities involved, as well as RAs issuing authenticators to other health and care staff.

If you want to start using Apply for Care ID, email [email protected] for the URL to the live service. We'll invite you to our drop-in sessions every Friday 11am to 12pm and support you to get started.

Apply for Care ID will enter Public Beta state in January 2023 but is currently available to any RA managers, agents or sponsors that have the URL and Windows Hello, a Security Key or smartcard with one of these roles assigned.

For more information about what you need to get started, view our support pages.