The NHS Spine is the UK’s equivalent to our OpenHIE Interoperability Layer. The Spine is the core service that carries message traffic in the UK related to digital health. Last October, for the first time, it topped 1 billion transactions per month. Today, the Spine carries 4x as much traffic as the UK’s banking network and, at peak, it was managing 3500 messages per second.
This is – simultaneously – super-exciting and super-scary. It is exciting because it demonstrates how crucial our digital health infrastructure will become in supporting care delivery in our partner countries. It is scary, because we need to start to cultivate the DevOps expertise (and, perhaps, new architectural patterns) necessary to support this kind of monstrous transaction volume on OpenHIE.
Food for thought…
Derek