Discovery findings
Background
The Digital Capabilities Framework (DCF) is a critical tool supporting National Health Service (NHS) England’s digital transformation and frontline digitisation agendas. It provides a framework to support NHS organisations in their procurement of electronic patient record systems (EPRs) by setting out EPR capabilities necessary to provide secondary care settings with the basic functionality that they need.
The DCF is currently provided in two formats, an online requirements catalogue hosted on the Confluence website, and an Excel document held on the NHS futures website and downloadable for local use.
About the discovery
A small, cross-functional team carried out a rapid discovery from February to March 2025 (8 weeks). This aimed to understand how the DCF is used, capturing its strengths and pain points and translating research findings into actionable insight for future development.
The team’s goal was to ensure the DCF could continue to meet its users’ needs and provide value to the NHS. The discovery approach was to:
- Research current users and needs. Mixed methods user research with DCF end users and wider stakeholders
- Themed analysis and synthesis. Analysis and synthesis to uncover unmet user needs, pain points and gaps, then translate research findings into actionable insight
- Wider strategic alignment. Requirements, dependencies, fit with government policy intent and potential for DCF to become a critical enabler for other programmes
- Digital platform functionality and performance. Areas where performance, accessibility and user experience could be improved
Research approach
The team carried out 19 depth interviews and small group workshops with people who used DCF in their day-to-day work in Maternity, Standards, Community, Connecting care, Procurement, and Frontline Digitisation.
Broadly, ‘end users’ used DCF to support service delivery in ICSs and Trusts, whereas ‘stakeholders’ used DCF as a foundation for their work (such as the NHS Frontline Digitisation Programme). Participants included 17 end users, 1 end user/stakeholder and 13 stakeholders.
The research had some limitations due to the short timebox - the team would have liked to have spoken to more people who were unfamiliar with DCF and to more end users. However, because the themes identified had a high level of congruency and consensus, the team was confident that it had captured common user needs sufficiently well.
Read the summary discovery report (PDF, 967kb)
Summary overview of discovery recommendations
| Recommendation | Makes it more… |
|---|---|
| Make DCF fully open (no password) and accessible | Usable, Useful |
| Simple, clear navigation that allows people to drill down | Usable |
| Improve guidance and resolve composite statements | Usable, Useful |
| Focus on core capabilities | Usable, Useful |
| Separate DCF from the products based on it | Usable |
| Create a logical information architecture and search function | Usable |
| Review taxonomy, consider an ontology | Usable |
| Create clear guidance on DCF’s purpose | Usable, Useful |
| Resolve inconsistent language in labelling and guidance | Usable, Useful |
| Consider renaming DCF (following further research) | Usable |
| Review gaps, conduct deep dives, consider public roadmap | Useful, Up-to-date |
| Create guidance on using DCF to hold suppliers to account | Useful |
| Create a comparison matrix for DMA, WGLL, DCF, HIMSS | Useful |
| Create derived products to support benchmarking and improvement | Useful |
| Review how DCF is updated and how changes are communicated | Up-to-date |
| Ensure versioning is sufficiently detailed and history recorded | Up-to-date, Useful |