The electronic backbone of the NHS, Spine, has been rebuilt to harness new technology, including Basho Technologies’ distributed database, Riak Enterprise
Spine is used by more than 20,000 organisations that provide health care across England, including primary and secondary care sites, pharmacies, opticians and dentists. Riak, an open source distributed database, is key to providing the reliability and scalability for the platform to drive efficiency and improve patient care.
The NHS’ move to revamp the Spine, in a major project led by England’s Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC), was driven by the need for a scalable, resilient and flexible system that would also result in cost-savings for the organisation.
Riak has been tested thoroughly over the past year and will also expected to allow the NHS to update the Spine seamlessly, removing interruptions which could adversely affect NHS employees and patients.
The transition was finalised over the weekend of August 22, 2014, with the infrastructure undergoing a 45-day period of intensive monitoring to ensure that it is performing as expected.
Adam Wray, CEO at Basho Technologies., said: “The improvement of patient care is of the utmost importance in the healthcare industry. As data, such as patient records, prescriptions and all other medical information becomes digitised, it is vital that government health organisations can adapt and provide constant, reliable access to this information.”
Stuart McCaul, Managing Director, EMEA at Basho Technologies, said: “The information stored on the Spine is potentially life-saving, and so users must be able to quickly access the data they require without delay or complication. Riak has previously been adopted by other healthcare services outside of the UK, such as The Danish Health and Medical Authority, and it provides the Spine with resiliency and predictable scalability while also saving the NHS both time and costs, contributing to the improvement of patient care in England.”
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Great to see Spine being upgraded in this way. It can be a hard task to convince healthcare professionals that making the ‘digital shift’ is the right way to go, so projects that prove the benefits of embracing technology are incredibly valuable to the industry.
As Adam says, moving paper-based processes to digital formats is vital if public services like the NHS are to adapt in the digital era. Digitising patient records and managing electronic documents to remove paper are just one part of it. With a system like this there are real plus points for patient care too, such as decreasing admin to free up time to care for patients or making the wealth of information stored by NHS Trusts more easily accessible.
While it may take some time – digitising traditionally paper-intensive systems can be a long and pretty complex task – it’s clear from what we see here that anyone taking on this digital challenge has a lot to look forward to in terms of achieving a more efficient, productive and sustainable healthcare environment.