The UK's Northern Care Alliance NHS Foundation Trust (NCA) is looking to move to the cloud.

The NCA has released its first digital strategy which covers the period of 2024 to 2030, setting goals for deploying digital solutions within the trust.

NHS
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The strategy notes that the NCA needs to "rationalize" its digital systems to reduce its server footprint. The trust added that it intends to move towards cloud-hosted solutions and wants to move away from its current need for a "considerable" data center.

In the executive summary, the NCA noted: "This seven-year strategy comes at one of the most challenging times in the NHS and for the NCA. We are faced with a significant revenue deficit and at the same time we have the ambition to drive true transformation across the Northern Care Alliance that will slingshot us into a future."

The NCA was formed in October 2021 as the result of the combination of two other NHS Trusts: Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust and Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust.

Prior to that, the trusts' had been working together on a "stabilization program" focused on issues surrounding legacy infrastructure impacting the Bury, Rochdale, and Oldham Care Organisations (BRO)

Between 2016 and 2022, the NCA handled a network and telephone replacement across BRO, and updated the server estate for data centers to host BRO's more than 700 servers.

The strategy adds that, during 2022 and early 2023, its focus shifted to the North Manchester General Hospital; in which the NCA decommissioned legacy applications and established a new data center at Oldham to enable the exit of NCA servers from the remaining North Manchester data center. In total, the NCA is currently hosting 1,801 servers across its data center footprint.

"Our aging and complex digital footprint necessitates considerable paper-based and manual processes in the provision of services for our patients and communities. This is driving additional and often hidden cost overheads through inefficient and time-consuming workflows," added the strategy.

As a result, the NCA is moving to a "cloud-first" strategy, noting that currently "the majority of our digital systems are hosted within our own data centers, requiring us to maintain a large infrastructure estate. We will drive rationalization of these to commence the reduction of our server footprint, which will underpin our transformation strategy, readying ourselves for a transition towards cloud-hosted solutions and away from having to maintain a considerable data center."

The NCA added that it will seek to return the data center space for clinical use in the future, "while maintaining some essential server presence on sites."

The trust will also be rationalizing its clinical application systems. Both rationalization strategies will involve searching for duplications and setting out a data strategy to support of data quality, insight, and analytics, driving a “thorough data cleanse.”

Ultimately, a single EPR system (Electronic Patient Record) will be established to bring together all patient information across all acute hospitals. The program is currently set to commence in 2024 and go live in 2027.

Limited information about the existing data center footprint besides the number of servers hosted has been shared by the NCA. DCD has reached out for more details.

Earlier this year the NHS decommissioned its data centers previously hosting the NHS Spine system, following a cloud migration project. The national body confirmed on January 3 that all physical data centers that were hosting the NHS hardware were decommissioned just prior to Christmas.