NHS England has called on IT professionals in health and social care to get involved in its consultation on the future of the NHS Spine.
It said the Spine, which provides an infrastructure for communications and data sharing between IT systems in the sector, will be the next subject of its series of bi-monthly webinars on the future of technology in care.
These are being held to encourage people to get involved in how technology can meet future needs in the sector.
Since April 2022, work has been underway to develop a new platform in place of the current NHS Spine over the next two to three years, with a core element being to make the new version cloud based.
In December last year, the Messaging Exchange for Health and Social Care (MESH) was replaced with a cloud version. MESH connects over 35,000 health and care organisations, enabling them to share a wide variety of data securely and reliably and at scale, with around 70,000 messages sent a month.
The next Spine service set to migrate to cloud is the National Record Locator (NRL).
Best use of tech
Stephen Koch, executive director for platforms at NHS England, said: “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.
“That's why we're actively engaging the health and care system with the development of the Spine Futures programme.”
The Spine Futures webinar takes place on 23 February at 3.30 pm. Registration here.
