October 8, 2013
Riak is built to handle critical data. Its design tenets of high availability, fault-tolerance, and scalability ensure that you will always have access to this critical data, no matter what happens behind the scenes, and that you can quickly grow to store it all, no matter what. This makes it an ideal fit for many industries, including healthcare. It’s also why the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK has selected Riak for its IT backbone.
To help drive efficiency and care improvements throughout the UK, the NHS created Spine1 as its centralized database of all patient health and prescription data. Through this innovation, critical patient information was always accessible and protected. However, the original Spine1 infrastructure required over 2,000 staff and was supported by 1,000 servers, which meant this system was pricey for the publicly funded NHS.
Over the past two years, the NHS has worked to revamp this database to be more cost-effective. They opted to move the system to Riak’s Riak and created Spine2. With Spine2, the NHS is able to not only cut costs, but also improve the performance and reliability of the system overall. Spine2 is planned to go live in early 2014.
In the healthcare space, The Danish Health and Medicines Authority also use Riak as the backend for their national health record system. Its high availability ensures that key patient information is always available, which can be life saving in many cases. Additionally, its ease-of-scale allows for governments or private companies to quickly add capacity as needed, without paying for unnecessary space.
For more information about Riak and the NHS, check out the full release.
