NICE Guidance Production Digitalisation Project

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) seeks to commission external solutions and services to support the creation and maintenance of its flagship health and social care guidance products from financial year 24/25 for a period of five years in the first instance. More information on NICE's programmes can be found at http://www.nice.org.uk. These services and solutions support NICE's five-year strategy through the delivery of useful and usable guideline recommendations for health and social care professionals.

The supplied services and solutions will span the entire workflow: the prioritisation of relevant healthcare topics for guidance production, the gathering and management of evidence, the creation and maintenance of healthcare guidance on the NICE website, and the dissemination and publication of NICE guidance to end-users and third parties.

Some of the benefits expected from an end-to-end solution are as follows:

• Digitisation/digitalisation of end-to-end data flows

• Simplification and automation of workflow processes

• Measurable, standardised and interoperable information for distribution to end-users and integration into third-party systems such as Electronic Patient Records platforms and decision support tools (see figure 1)

• Fidelity of information so it is current and quantifiable

• Improved discoverability through a more granular presentation of the content, which will improve adoption and take-up of guidance

In terms of NICE these would be some of the expected benefits for the organisation:

• an audit trail of decisions made throughout the workflow process including the ability to assign unique identifiers to recommendations

• enhanced product capabilities enabling NICE to disseminate targeted knowledge products to individual audiences through the reuse of content components

• automation to support labour-intensive processes, for example for the surveillance of evidence, the creation of guidelines, and managing mainly unstructured and semi-structured data using various external and internal datapoints

It is expected that vendors will adhere to interoperability standards such as CDS Hooks and FHIR and prevalent data and information standards.

NICE's guidance and advice can be used by the NHS, local authorities, employers, voluntary groups and anyone else involved in delivering care or promoting wellbeing. Documents describing the methods and processes employed by NICE in developing its guidance are available from NICE's website (www.nice.org.uk)

This link explains how NICE develops guidelines:

https://www.nice.org.uk/about/what-we-do/our-programmes/nice-guidance/nice-guidelines/how-we-develop-nice-guidelines