NHS Shifts From Ill-Fated Spine To Spine 2 [United Kingdom]

The NHS Spine has been moved onto a new infrastructure by the Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC) in an IT operation completed over the weekend.  The Spine is a part of the national infrastructure that stores patient information and enables electronic messaging, it was part of the ill-fated NHS National Programme for IT (NPfIT).  The NPfIT programme had been scrapped despite costing taxpayers nearly £10bn, and was criticised by MPs last year as the "worst and most expensive contracting fiasco in the history of the public sector".

One of the key issues that was linked with the project was that it did not use an agile development methodology, and this is something that the Department for Health is attempting to fix. It is also using open-source software as part of the NHS Spine re-procurement project, dubbed Spine 2.  The Spine core services and messaging transitioned across to the new infrastructure in phases, HSCIC said in a statement...