NHSE CIO calls for trusts to stop developing their own data centres

NHS England chief information officer (CIO) John Quinn has urged trusts to stop investing in developing their own local data centres and instead move to cloud solutions.

Speaking at a regional conference of NHS IT leaders, in Harrogate on 14 November 2024, Quinn said, “If you have your own data centres and are about to invest further into them, I don’t think you should, you should buy the service from a cloud provider.

“This is low value high commodity stuff you shouldn’t do yourself. Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Oracle they all do that at scale.”

He suggested that NHSE could play a useful in aggregating demand from the NHS and then negotiating national deals on cloud computing, rather every local organisation negotiating its own local deal.

“We should not be letting them pick us off one by one.  We should instead be negotiating deals nationally,” Quinn said.

Speaking to the North Yorkshire and Humber Directors of Informatics Forum (NYHDIF), Quinn said the NHSE Transformation Directorate had an important role to play in connecting people, disseminating best practice and overcoming fragmentation.

Currently he said there was a lot of duplication of solutions, with different people repeatedly building very similar apps to solve the same problems.

To overcome this fragmentation and duplication NHSE will launch a marketplace and innovation hub with TechUK on 4 December, said Quinn.

“Following an app store model this will showcase developments across the country,” said Quinn.  “It’s for apps that exist and people build time and time again.”

The new marketplace and innovation hub, which has a working title of NHS Marketplace,  is being supported by Microsoft.

According to the TechUK website, the NHS Marketplace is a cloud-based platform aimed at becoming “the go-to space for the NHS to share reusable solutions, foster collaboration, and accelerate innovation, all while reducing costs and eliminating duplication”.

It adds that the platform “will provide developer toolkits and cloud-enabled workspaces, breaking down technical barriers to bring local innovations to life and serving as a comprehensive digital knowledge hub for the entire NHS”.

Quinn thanked the audience for completing lengthy digital maturity questionnaires and assured them the data had proved essential in bidding for national investment.

“I know you all love completing DMA every year, but we would not have secured funding without that data,” he said.

Acknowledging local NHS organisations are under intense financial pressure, the NHS CIO told the NYHDIF audience that centrally NHSE was batting in their corner for sustained investment in digital.

“You have often been shielded by the centre from digital spend controls,” Quinn said.

Delivering a keynote session at Digital Health Summer Schools in July 2024, Quinn said that the DMA needs to be “useful and useable” and spoke about the need for a “one digital approach” which would start with patients’ needs first.

Meanwhile, NHS Shared Business Services announced in November 2024 that it has won a place on a new national framework agreement for the provision of cloud-based services to all public sector organisations, including the NHS.