NHS to hold webinars on future of IT platforms

Professionals from the health and social care sector will be encouraged to get involved with the future of technology in the NHS during a series of webinars held by NHS England. 

The bi-monthly ‘Spine Future’ sessions comes as part of the organisations work to develop a new digital platform to replace NHS Spine, which brings together over 28,000 IT systems in healthcare but is being moved to a cloud-based platform.

Stephen Koch, the Executive Director for Platforms at NHS England, said: ‘We’re asking colleagues working in health and care to tell us what they need from the Spine of the future as we take the next steps of our journey to transform IT in health and social care.’ 

‘We want the Spine of the future to make the best use of modern technologies and open standards to ensure it meets the needs of NHS users for many years to come.’ He added. 

Alongside hearing about the plans for the future of NHS Spine, attendees to the webinars will also be able to share their needs for the national service and communicate with those working on the project. 

Since work began on the move to modernise platforms in April last year, services have already begun to migrate with the Messaging Exchange for Health and Social Care, which connects about 35,000 health and care organisations, successfully moving to a cloud-based version in December. 

Mr Koch said: ‘Last year’s migration of the MESH service to the cloud was a massive achievement for the teams involved and a significant first step in our Spine Futures programme.’ 

The next service set to migrate to a cloud-based version is the National Record Locator, a service which allows for the national sharing and directing towards of data held in local provider systems. 

Anyone who works in heath and care for the NHS, specifically in the IT sector, and wants to attend the webinars can register here. The next session is scheduled to take place on Thursday February 23. 

The NHS isn’t the only public sector organisation seeking to modernise the systems they use as the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency recently signed a contract to continue the transferring of its IT platforms to a cloud-hosted alternative.

Photo by Chris Montgomery