NHS Grows A NoSQL Backbone And Rips Out Its Oracle Spine [United Kingdom]

Open source? In the government? Ha ha! What, wait ...?

The NHS has ripped the Oracle backbone from a national patient database system and inserted NoSQL running on an open-source stack.  Spine2 has gone live following successful redevelopment including redeployment on new, x86 hardware. The project to replace Spine1 had been running for three years with Spine2 now undergoing a 45-day monitoring period.

Spine is the NHS’s main secure patient database and messaging platform, spanning a vast estate of blades and SANs.  It logs the non-clinical information on 80 million people in Britain – holding data on everything from prescriptions and payments to allergies.  Spine is also a messaging hub, serving electronic communications between 20,000 applications that include the Electronic Prescription Service and Summary Care Record. It processes more than 500 complex messages a second.

Spine1 had run on Oracle under an out-sourced contract managed by telecoms giant BT. Spine1 had to change to respond to the changing needs of the NHS, says the Health and Social Care Information Center (HSCIC) - the NHS organisation running the system. HSCIC believes open source and NoSQL will be easier to live with...