18.02.16
NHS Spine successfully moved in-house after 18-month redevelopment
The ‘electronic backbone of the NHS’ has been successfully moved entirely in-house after an 18 month redevelopment project.
The Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC) announced yesterday that the transition project to rebuild Spine on Open Source software and move it to in-house management has been completed with no disruptions.
Spine carries almost 150TB of data, including 80 million people’s details and more than 2.6 billion information requests and amendments each year. It connects staff and patients to services including the Electronic Prescription Service, Summary Care Record and the e-Referral Service.
Rob Shaw, HSCIC director of assurance services, said: “The usual practice for a big public sector project like this has been to give the whole thing to a large supplier. We decided that we could manage and make improvements to Spine more flexibly in-house, and have worked with a number of specialist SMEs to successfully deliver our aims.
“The NHS relies on the Spine in order to operate effectively, and we couldn’t afford for it to experience long periods of downtime. For this reason we planned the transitions minute by minute to ensure that we would not affect patient care or inconvenience NHS workers any more than was absolutely necessary. In the end we managed the entire transition with just minutes of downtime, none of which was unplanned.”
The new Spine, which is managed from HSCIC’s Leeds headquarters, is believed to be the biggest public sector IT system to be built entirely on Open Source software.
The system, which won an award at the 2015 iCMG World Summit, saved the NHS £21m in its first year, and saves the equivalent of 750 working days’ worth of time every day for the health service.
It was successfully rebuilt as Spine 2 in September 2014.
In the Jan/Feb issue of NHE, Dan Taylor, programme head of cyber security at HSCIC, talked to NHE about how a co-ordinated approach is being developed to tackle cyber security across the health and social care system.