The NHS Choose and Book system (recently renamed and re-launched as the “e-Referral Service”) provides a core electronic system for handling patient referrals to secondary healthcare providers. Whilst the service has been available since 2005 its take up has been patchy and in some ways troubled. A significant component of this has been due to the very high cost of connection to the secure NHS N3 network and NHS Spine services, around which the service is based. This has led to a situation where a dual paper/phone and electronic operation is currently required, making it extremely difficult for the e-Referral Service to achieve the significant cost savings and improvements in efficiency that were the original objective of the “Choose and Book” project. The QURIS project creates an innovative new approach to providing low cost connectivity; particularly for small to medium sized healthcare providers, to the e-Referral Service without compromising the inherent and integral security of the NHS N3 network and NHS Spine services. In doing so it will achieve two very significant advances for healthcare in the UK: - it will remove any economic barriers that prevent all healthcare providers offering their appointments through the e-Referral Service; - it will establish the potential for providing both flexibility and low cost access for other NHS Spine services, greatly extending the reach and benefits available with what is a crucial strategic area for UK healthcare. If successful QURIS will deliver a novel system that is fully accredited via the Common Assurance Process governing all NHS N3 and NHS Spine systems and which also has been approved by the Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC), the body responsible for regulating NHS Spine services.

The aim of the Summary Care Record (SCR) Gateway Project is to create the first managed integrated services gateway to provide timely and controlled access to patient information. By 2014, 40 million SCRs should have been uploaded to the NHS Spine. Ease of access to the SCR will be essential whenever and wherever a patient is being treated. The key objectives are to: a) Establish a location-aware Legitimate Relationship, Authorisation, Authentication and Access Control capability to ensure the SCR is only available to healthcare professionals who have access permission or need access to provide essential treatment; b) Create a new set of APIs that will enable 3rd party systems to use the SCR Gateway. The API will become part of the NHS’s Interoperability Toolkit i.e. it will be an open standard available to all; c) Create the SCR Gateway that will manage access to the SCR and the SCR client that will enable Healthcare Professionals to view the GP Summary. The benefits of the SCR Gateway to the end users will be: a) Patients will receive better treatment because the appropriate accurate clinical information will be available to doctors, nurses, etc. in a timely fashion at the point of delivery of treatment. Furthermore, this information will automatically ‘follow’ patients as they move geographically and systematically. b) Healthcare professionals will provide better support and treatment because they will have more accurate and timely information about the patient e.g. allergies to drugs, etc. Also, they will have access to all of the relevant data about a patient, irrespective of the native healthcare systems used by their institution or the time and location of the required access. The key deliverable of this 15 mth Project is the evaluation of the SCR Gateway Proof of Concept demonstrator that will undergo NHS compliance and operational deployment. This will enable the evaluation to be undertaken in real operational conditions.

The aim of this project is to create the first managed Integrated Services Gateway (the Gateway) which allows legacy systems to access the NHS Spine services and data.