Executive Summary

The Evaluation of the Revalidation Service is being carried out by Perfectly Simple IT Solutions (PSIT) in conjunction with Health Education England personnel, from 18 December 2019 to 30 January 2020.

The Evaluation will focus on the existing Revalidation Service, and how to improve the service for users and administrators. It aims to identify the problems and understand user needs; as well as any additional issues that may be faced, such as technology constraints or accessibility.

The research and activities are being conducted in line with the Government Digital Service (GDS) definition and guidance of the digital service Discovery Phase.

The Evaluation will conclude with a validated and prioritised user story backlog and a set of proposals/recommendations for the Revalidation team to consider if progressing the service to Alpha.

Summary of proposals/recommendations:

• Overarching recommendations:

  • Revalidation should be fully integrated into TIS

• User experience recommendations:

  • Revalidation screens and TIS Core screens should be aligned in design terms

  • A robust and reliable service must be provided

  • Proper product support must be provided

• Technology recommendations:

  • The service should be based in the cloud, either AWS or Azure

  • AWS would be the preferred choice as it has a much richer offering than Azure

  • The service should be containerised so that moving cloud providers is relatively easy

  • The service should be implemented using micro-service principles

  • The back end services should be decoupled from the web interface and each other to allow for easy scaling

• Data recommendations:

  • Data items should not be duplicated within TIS

  • TIS identifier should be removed from screens and replaced with GMC/GDC number

  • Correlation Ids should be used on messages so that they can be tracked through the system

  • All data changes should be audited

  • Revalidation data should be exported to the data warehouse to enable reporting from Tableau

• Governance recommendations:

  • There should be a corporate data governance team and data dictionary