Building on the success of the operational, resilient gateway between JANET and N3, JANET(UK) and the NHS are now focusing on the potential extra benefits that the gateway can provide.

Staff are working on the business cases for service enhancements that will make the gateway a truly shared service and extend the remit of users in both health and education, letting them use one service where they currently use at least two and greatly extending the area of overlap between the two communities.

At present the gateway only supports access from N3 to JANET. The baseline deliverable is therefore a bi-directional service, letting users on JANET access services on N3 safely and securely through the gateway. This will be of clear benefit in a range of use cases: for example, an NHS Clinician who works part of the week at an NHS Trust and the rest of the week at the local university; a National Institute for Health Researcher working at a university who needs access to NHS-based information such as policies and procedures; and researchers who have permission from ethical committees to collect patient data from NHS trusts for patients who have consented to be part of the study. All of these will be able to access NHS systems directly from their local academic network, removing the need to travel to or be based at each individual NHS site.

A second deliverable will allow computer-to-computer interaction between the networks so that, for example, clinical data such as MRI scans could be taken on university scanners and forwarded to NHS systems, or clinical data could be fed from the NHS for high performance computing analysis and the results fed back to the NHS to help with clinical decisions.

Remaining deliverables focus on enhancing actual services currently available: to integrate the videoconferencing services of both networks; to develop NHSMail as a secure e-mail solution between the networks; to support use of eduroam in N3, for example to support academic staff and students visiting a health organisation; and federated access to web-based resources in a pilot health community, so that for example NHS users would have access to JANET web resources with NHS credentials.

Two further deliverables to help staff understand and resolve the governance and technical challenges involved in connecting local NHS organisations to shared network infrastructure are being taken forward separately through the N3 Succession Plan programme, which looks ahead to the point after the existing N3 contract expires in 2013, and will inform the development of the successor network.

Max Finch, Head of Voice & Data Networks and Services for the NHS Technology Office, said, “This is an excellent opportunity to build on the investment already made in the live JANET/ N3 Gateway to offer enhanced services, making life easier for staff working in health and education and clinical research.”