The 10 projects at the heart of NHS IT

NHSmail

Formerly known as Contact, NHSmail is a secure national email and directory service, provided free to NHS staff and developed with Cable & Wireless.

Find out more about the 10 key NHS IT projects

♦  NHS Care Records Service

♦  Choose and Book

♦  The Electronic Prescription Service

♦  N3 national broadband network

♦  Picture Archiving and Communications System (Pacs)

♦  The Spine

♦  The Quality Management and Analysis System

♦  GP2GP record transfer

♦  NHSmail- a central email and directory service for the NHS

♦  Secondary Uses Service

NHSmail provides a national directory of people in the NHS, including their name, email addresses, telephone numbers, name and address of their NHS organisation, and information about departments, job roles and specialities.

Users have an email address that stays with them as they move around the NHS, and the service features calendars and folders that can be shared with other users, plus automatic encryption of emails.

What progress so far?

An average of 983,152 messages are sent and received across NHSmail daily.

The number of registered users is increasing every week and there are now almost 400,000 registered users - when migration of staff to NHSmail is complete, that figure should rise to over one million users.

All members of staff for NHS Connecting for Health, the department looking after health service IT, have already migrated to NHSmail.

CfH has deferred migration of NHSmail to Microsoft Exchange 2007 from Mirapoint until January 2009 because it could not guarantee that the upgrade would meet the standard of the existing system.