On 24^th June, the UK National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) published a paper on its NICE Evidence Standards Framework for digital health and care technologies (DHTs).

The framework, “designed to provide a standardised approach to guide developers and commissioners on the levels of evidence needed for the clinical and economic evaluation of DHTs by health and care systems”, was developed in partnership with a number of key stakeholders, including Public Health England, NHS England and NHS Improvement.

MindTech took a keen interest in the Evidence Standards Framework (ESF) from the outset, participating in NICE’s stakeholder public consultation in January 2019, and earlier Health App Briefings (HABs).

In collaboration with mHabitat, the team developed a framework aimed specifically at evaluating mobile mental health tools. Funded by NHS England as a Digital Development Lab project, the guidance was published in October 2017. It was available to NICE during the development of their ESF and is acknowledged as providing “lessons learned”.

We are pleased to have acknowledgement of our earlier work and are pleased to be cited in NICE’s new paper, and to read about the impact of the standards framework so far. We expect to play a part in the future too, to refine methods for evaluation of digital mental health in particular.

Dr. Michael Craven (MindTech)

In their paper, NICE state that “The evidence standards framework has been well-received and to date the ESF has been viewed online over 55,000 times and downloaded over 19,000 times.”.