Public Cloud for the National Digital Platform

NHS Education for Scotland (NES) for provision of public cloud services to host the National Digital Platform.

Development of the National Digital Platform (NDP) is a commitment under the Scottish Government’s Digital Health and Care Strategy which was published in April 2018. The NDP work is being taken forward by NES Digital Service.

The Platform will:

• make it possible to create and deploy real time data at the point of care (including through self-service) to improve the quality of care and patient outcomes;
• operate to a predictable architecture which to enable new and innovative products to be developed and implemented across the health and care system; and
• enable the use of data at scale for quality improvement and to support research and innovation.

The cloud infrastructure would be used to host the NDP including: repositories for storing structured and unstructured clinical data, web services to power web and mobile applications, an integration layer and web apps.

The procurement will include minimum security standards, desired security outcomes and some specific security requirements such as

• Compliance with NCSC cloud security principles
• ISO27001 or equivalent

The cloud services need to include platform as a service and infrastructure as a service, with provision for virtual networks, on demand computing and data storage.

In considering bids NES Digital Service will be interested in additional services related to the storage and management of clinical data.

In considering bids NES Digital Service will be interested in the opportunities presented by the bidder for the collaborative development of new technology related to healthcare and healthcare data.