Spine Messaging Handler (SMH) is an innovative messaging product developed by CareMotive for healthcare solution providers looking
for easy, swift and secure access to patient demographic information and NHS numbers from the Spine.
SMH is a flexible off-the-shelf solution that enables any system to communicate with the NHS’ Personal Demographics Service (PDS). SMH was recently accredited as an ITK-compliant Spine Mini Services Provider (SMSP) by the Health and Social Care Information Centre; allowing organisations which use it to bypass the need for accreditation of their own systems.
SMH’s cross-platform architecture allows for easy deployment, low maintenance, and long term use. The product offers: batch or real-time access to Spine data; use with either an embedded or external database; cloud-hosted or locally deployed options; low resource requirements; and per-transaction or per-installation licencing models. In addition, SMH is the first SMSP accredited for multi-tenanted use, meaning that multiple organisations can use a single instance.
CareMotive Director, Mr Paul Richardson, stated that “SMH is the first specialised standalone NHS Spine messaging system that’s orientated towards healthcare solution providers. The solution can be easily deployed into any system, and is very low maintenance.”
CareMotive not only offers easy deployment but also great tech support. SMH is developer friendly and has drop-in client libraries that support Java, PHP and .Net. An online instance of SMH is already available for developers to test configurations and CareMotive plans to launch an online developer portal in the near future. CareMotive also actively provides ongoing training and support to solution providers.
Mr Richardson noted that “the combination of our client libraries and being able to access a test instance of SMH online make it extremely easy to integrate any system with PDS – all that’s required are two lines of code.”
In 2011, building on an already successful relationship with Silverlink, CareMotive licensed the rights to certain elements of SMH’s IP from Silverlink Software Ltd and has added two significant capabilities to produce a universal, off-the-shelf solution: an SMSP interface and support for the electronic transfer of prescriptions messaging (ETP). Mr Richardson explained; “the best way to put it is that while the solution has a heritage with Silverlink, CareMotive has really taken the technology forward as an independent value-added-reseller.”