The Common Assurance Process provides a number of benefits. These include:

• a clear, transparent approach that provides a common basis for NHS Connecting for Health (NHS CFH), suppliers and end users to work together to develop and implement high quality and clinically-safe IT services;
• a repeatable process in which learning is consolidated and shared within NHS CFH and the supplier and user communities;
• a flexible process in which the emphasis on each stage can be changed as appropriate (e.g for small-scale pilots involving one site versus a national roll-out of a system to 5000 sites);
• common quality and safety standards, with all suppliers of the same type (e.g. GP, community pharmacy), implementing the same service (e.g. Choose and Book, Electronic Prescription Service), being managed in accordance with the same process;
• clinical safety, scope clarity and user engagement are built in to the process from the outset, ensuring safer and better services are specified, designed and delivered;
• an effective fit with the Interoperability Toolkit, or ITK, which is being developed to enable third party integration with local service provider systems by providing standards and frameworks to support interoperability covering transactional and analytical services.