The challenge
In normal times, NES Digital Service (NDS), the digital arm of NHS Education for Scotland, builds digital services that transform how health and care works across Scotland. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Scottish Government asked NDS to support citizens at the highest clinical risk from the virus.
NDS was tasked with building a platform to get food to Scottish citizens identified as at significant clinical risk. Given the fast-moving nature of COVID-19, it had to be built in a very short period of time. And because the project involved collecting and sharing the demographic data of thousands of Scottish citizens, secure data exchange was non-negotiable.
"We are dealing with people's health information at a time of crisis and heightened media attention to the Government and how it supports its citizens. End to end encryption was taken as a given."
Alistair Ewing · Senior Product Manager, NES Digital Service
A platform connecting government, councils and food partners
Accustomed to exchanging data with hospitals and large government agencies, NDS suddenly found itself working with public- and private-sector partners outside healthcare — supermarkets and food-delivery vendors. The platform had to operate at scale, connecting 32 Local Authorities, 6 supermarkets and 2 food-delivery companies. NDS provided each partner with lists of at-risk individuals and received status feedback on deliveries, so no one fell through the gaps.
The solution
NDS leveraged SendSafely Workspaces, coupled with automation built on the SendSafely Developer API, to meet its data-exchange goals. Every partner interaction was standardized: each group gave and received data securely inside a dedicated Workspace, and file delivery was automated through the API.
Two weeks after receiving the directive, NDS was live. Partners spanning a wide range of industries and technical literacy got up and running on the simple Workspaces portal with little to no training — so rollout support was one less thing the NDS team had to worry about. Today the service supports over 115,000 citizens in Scotland.
"We were able to get started very quickly with SendSafely. Our partners were also up and running quickly and found it easy to use."
Geoff Huggins · Director, NES Digital Service
