The Digital Technology Assessment Criteria (DTAC) is the NHS's national baseline that digital health technologies are assessed against before being adopted across the health and care system. Introduced by NHS England, it brings together clinical safety (DCB0129/DCB0160), data protection (including the DSPT), technical security, interoperability, and usability and accessibility into a single assessment. It is how NHS organizations judge whether a digital product is safe and suitable to deploy, giving health-tech vendors one consistent bar to clear.
Digital Technology Assessment Criteria
The Digital Technology Assessment Criteria is the NHS’s single front door for judging whether a digital health product is safe and suitable to deploy. Rather than a vendor facing a different bar at every trust, DTAC brings the key requirements into one baseline assessment.
- Five areas - Clinical safety (DCB0129/DCB0160), data protection (including the DSPT), technical security, interoperability, and usability and accessibility.
- One consistent bar - It gives health-tech vendors a single, national criteria set to clear rather than bespoke local reviews.
- Adoption-gating - NHS organizations use it to decide whether to bring a product in.
DTAC belongs in the catalogue as the interoperability-and-safety companion to the DSPT, and it points at the same finding from my UK healthcare scoring: the NHS has built genuinely rigorous assurance, and its suppliers publish almost none of it in machine-readable form. DTAC even includes interoperability as an assessed dimension — yet the cohort’s contracts rarely surface the FHIR conformance, consent, or examples that would make that interoperability legible to an agent. The assessment exists; the published, checkable evidence of passing it does not, and that is the gap worth closing.
Referenced in API Evangelist papers
This regulation shows up in my published research. These reports read the machine-readable evidence provider by provider — and put this regulation in the context of a real sector.
The State of UK Healthcare APIs
The NHS baseline for digital health technology, covering clinical safety, security, interoperability, and usability.
