London, 27^th March 2024: Every year the NHS Innovation Accelerator (NIA) selects a cohort of technology innovators to participate in its award-winning programme, receiving expert training and advice to help scale their innovations across the NHS in England. To ensure all participating innovations operate safely within the NHS, the programme includes an assessment of the innovation’s readiness in meeting the Digital Technology Assessment Criteria (DTAC), the NHS criteria for digital health technologies in the NHS and social care. 

This year, to substantially reduce the time and cost burden on the NIA and innovators in achieving DTAC, the programme is using an automated compliance platform from Naq. 

When offered a conditional place on the programme, innovators with a digital component to their health solutions completed an assessment on the Naq platform. This produced a gap analysis of where each stood in relation to achieving the DTAC, and if the criteria had not yet been met in full, simple step by step guidance on the actions needed to meet all criteria. 

Naq is an automated platform that guides businesses through gaining compliance with NHS required frameworks such as GDPR, Cyber Essentials, Data Security Protection Toolkit (DSPT) and DTAC. By automating over 80% of the manual work necessary to comply with these frameworks, Naq reduces the time and cost traditionally associated with meeting compliance.

Commenting on the Naq support, Mindy Simon, Co-Director at the NHS Innovation Accelerator, said “We wanted a system to ensure absolute clarity on what is needed to meet the DTAC. It also needed to be robust, whilst not burdening the programme or innovators with excessive cost or resource demands. The automated platform from Naq achieves all of this. 

“The direct support the NIA team received from Naq team members to understand where each of the innovators are on their DTAC journey was immeasurable; the Naq team were always responsive and willing to offer advice when needed. We would recommend Naq for any innovator looking to undertake the DTAC.”   

Doc Abode, one of this year’s Cohort, is an innovative cloud-hosted dynamic scheduling software tailored for the NHS which harnesses real-time insights into workforce capacity, proximity, and expertise, enhancing efficiency, improving patient care, and driving savings by reducing unnecessary admissions.

Dr Taz Aldawoud, Founder and CEO of Doc Abode, said about their experience of the assessment "We have been compliant with DTAC assessment for some time but maintaining and demonstrating our credentials in the past has been onerous.

The Naq platform makes the whole process remarkably seamless to complete, offering intuitive means to easily share our compliance status with the NIA programme. The Naq dashboard also provides us with a live overview of how we’re doing on each domain, simplifying our journey towards sustained DTAC compliance.”

Commenting on the initiative, Nadia Kadhim, CEO, Naq said “I am extremely proud that Naq has been chosen to provide this assessment as part of the NIA programme. The line-up of innovators has the potential to make a huge impact on the NHS and the lives of patients. I’m delighted we can play our part; helping them to meet the compliance needed to operate in the NHS, safely and efficiently.”  

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