We are committed to building Vic in a way that meets NHS standards for safety, security, and effectiveness. This page outlines our compliance roadmap and evidence approach.
Clinical Safety
Vic is a non-clinical communication tool. It does not provide medical diagnosis, clinical triage, or treatment advice. Its function is limited to operational communication: wait time updates, visit progress, practical support, and feedback capture. This boundary is maintained by design. Vic’s conversational flows are authored by clinicians and follow a structured decision tree — it does not generate clinical content autonomously.
Information governance roadmap
- Vic has not yet been deployed in a live NHS setting. Before any patient-facing pilot, we are committed to achieving the following:
- Cyber Essentials certification: Our first compliance milestone, establishing baseline cybersecurity protections. This is our current priority.
- DTAC (Digital Technology Assessment Criteria): We are designing Vic with the DTAC framework as our target, covering the five core areas: clinical safety, data protection, technical security, interoperability, and usability and accessibility.
- DSPT (Data Security and Protection Toolkit): We intend to complete the DSPT ahead of any formal NHS pilot to demonstrate our data handling meets NHS standards. We believe in being transparent about where we are in this process. We are at pre-pilot stage, and we are building compliance into the product from the ground up rather than retrofitting it later.
Data and privacy
Vic communicates via WhatsApp, which provides end-to-end encryption. We are developing a clear data processing model that will define what patient data Vic handles, how it is stored, and how long it is retained. Our approach is guided by UK GDPR, the Data Protection Act 2018, and NHS data handling best practice. A full privacy policy and Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) are in development and will be published on this page as they are completed.
Evidence base
- Vic is currently in the pre-pilot phase. We are building the evidence base to support a formal NHS pilot through: — Stakeholder engagement with NHS urgent care clinicians, operational managers, and service leads — Literature review on the impact of non-clinical interruptions on clinical workflow — Patient experience research on communication gaps in urgent care waiting rooms — Iterative product testing with clinical input at each stage of development