Two NHS services move to the cloud

The NHS e-Referral Service (e-RS) and the NHS 111 Directory of Services (DoS) have completed their migration to the cloud, making the services more secure and efficient.

e-RS is a national electronic booking service that annually handles approximately 18 million referrals. It provides patients with a choice of place, date and time for first hospital or clinic appointments that they can book themselves, as well as providing the ability to cancel or change those appointments.

The DoS is a critical national 24/7 service which underpins urgent and emergency care across the country by connecting patients with the right services to meet their needs.

Many NHS systems are moving to the cloud as a result of the government’s ‘Cloud First’ policy. The e-RS and DoS are the first major NHS systems to complete migration, using AWS Cloud Computing Services.

Neil Bennett, Director of Services at NHS Digital, said: “There are a wealth of benefits that come from moving large systems like e-RS and DoS to the cloud.  Costs are lowered, reducing pressure on the public purse, there is better security and reliability, as well as greater flexibility, performance, scalability and availability, to name a few. This was a tremendous collaborative effort across many different teams here and with external partners, to migrate such large systems with a minimum of disruption to users, in a reasonably short timescale.”