Market Engagement for Enhanced Secure Authentication and Citizen Authentication

The Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC) is holding a Market Engagement event for providers interested in potential opportunities for Enhanced Secure Authentication and Citizen Authentication services.

HSCIC has been operating an authentication service for SPINE on behalf of Department of Health. This service is a new requirement for an additional authentication service as part of the smartcard authentication. HSCIC is looking for an authentication service to improve the current SPINE Authentication for the NHS.

HSCIC is engaging with the market to understand how the market might respond or suggest how the service would be delivered and where value of money can be added. This may be followed by further supplier engagement to clarify information, before finalising an updated set of requirements. HSCIC might go out to competitive tender on this requirement in June or July, 2016. The supplier shall provide the service throughout England. HSCIC shall not be liable for any cost incurred by a supplier as a result of the market engagement.

The existing Spine CIS (Care Identity Service) Authentication Service (or Spine Security Broker) was transitioned in-house in February, 2015. It was re-housed on new infrastructure and an up to date platform, however, as the main remit of the transition was to minimise the risk to the organisation on transition itself, the functionality and interfaces it delivered remained the same. The IT authentication landscape and indeed the NHS itself as an organisation has moved on since the original inception of the SSB (Spine Security Broker) hence there are needs which cannot be satisfied by the original service.

Requirements

A: Enhance Secure Authentication

The Care Identity Service (CIS) is the Identity and Access Management System for users and systems wishing to connect to the NHS Spine. It provides registration, authentication and authorisation functionality for over 1 million users and 28,000 system endpoints across 21,000 organisations.

As part of the Service we are looking for a new Enhanced Secure Authentication service to authenticate, authorise or federate all users who provide services within or for the NHS.

B: Citizen

On 13th November 2014, the National Implementation Board (NIB) and the Department of Health (DH) published “Personalised Health and Care 2020: A Framework for Action”.

The framework advocates better use of data and technology to improve health, transform quality, and reduce the cost of healt and care services. A key objective of this framework is to enable citizens to make the right health and care choices, by providing digital access to health and care information and transactions.

All suppliers interested in the market engagement should confirm their attendance with the names of staff attending this event by sending a request through the e-mail below with HCON00421 as the reference:

Procmail@hscic.gov.uk

Additional information: Prior to commencing the Further Competition, HSCIC would like to invite interested suppliers to a market engagement on the 20th of May, 2016:

Suppliers should email: Procmail@hscic.gov.uk for confirmation of attendance