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Yorkshire & Humber
Care Record

When Yorkshire & Humber Care Record’s existing on-premise HSCN routing proved too slow for real-time clinical data sharing across the region, Cloud Gateway – recommended by Google’s own team based on prior joint work – provisioned a direct Google Cloud-to-HSCN interconnect and had YHCR fully onboarded within two weeks.

Real-time clinical data sharing across Yorkshire and the Humber

0 weeks

From engagement to go-live

The Cloud Gateway team understood the need to move quickly to connect our cloud environment to the HSCN. With the connectivity fully deployed in two weeks from our first discussion, we were able to avoid long SLAs which would have caused huge delays to the programme.

Lee Rickles

Yorkshire & Humber Care Record Programme Director & Chief Information Officer

The challenge

Yorkshire & Humber Care Record (YHCR) is a partnership across the Yorkshire and Humber region delivering better and faster access to health and care records for clinicians, social care staff, and citizens. YHCR was a successful exemplar within NHS England’s local health and care record programme launched in 2018.

For the population health component of the platform – which shares real-time, de-identified clinical data across the region – YHCR took an internet-first approach using Google Cloud Platform. This required HSCN connectivity to access national services such as the Personal Demographics Service, Southern Care Record, and other systems only available via the private government network.

The on-premise component already had HSCN connectivity. To connect the Google Cloud workload, YHCR had been routing via on-premise – but the connection was slow and clunky, severely undermining the ability to share data in real time, which was the core requirement of the programme.

What we did

Google’s own team had been working with Cloud Gateway on similar projects and recommended us to the YHCR programme team.

We set up a working proof of concept in minutes. From there, we created a diverse Cloud Interconnect from the YHCR virtual private cloud in Google Cloud to their tenancy on Cloud Gateway. All traffic to and from the HSCN is routed via Cloud Gateway and subject to security policies. The new solution was provisioned and fully onboarded in two weeks from first engagement.

The impact

Direct Google Cloud-to-HSCN connectivity live in two weeks from first engagement, replacing slow on-premise routing
Real-time data sharing now possible across the region for clinical direct care and population health use cases
Access to national services including the Personal Demographics Service, with capacity to extend to the National Record Locator Service and GP Connect as the programme grows