E-health - Aimes

AIMES are a bespoke cloud solutions provider specifying in the provision of cloud for health data based applications and digital services.

Although AIMES provide these services on the whole within England and the UK, AIMES host European wide Clinical Data Entry Tools, and also host applications which have users across Europe. Examples of said services are as follows.

  • Electronic Patient Record Systems – All Scripts for Liverpool Broadgreen Heart and Chest Hospital
  • Clinical Data Entry tool - REDCap for PIBD-SETQuality (GA Number 668023)
  • N3 Hosting for Intelesant, an SME specialising in health data for digital services
  • Cancer Treatment Digital Service - Aridhia

AIMES as an HSCIC (Health Social Care Information Centre) approved N3 aggregator are permitted to endorse access to the N3 network. This is because the business has in place the appropriate cloud and network architectures to ensure legal compliance.

There has been an increased awareness of multi-cloud technology, particularly within the health domain where services need to exist beyond borders and customers have requested this approach when implementing their eHealth services.

Currently the problems faced around hosting health data across Europe are: (1) Legal Compliance, (2) Resilience, and (3) Performance. Often there is a compromise to be made in one of these areas to facilitate the implementation of services using health data. For example Multi-Cloud deployments of Clinical Research Platforms will solve legal compliance issues regarding the location of data. This will allow us to be able to easily address governance issues and satisfy concerns of governance officers. AIMES also need to address the issue of interoperability, and the ability to federate with other European CSPs using a common framework.

AIMES have been asked to host a digital service which takes in health data from a number of European Member states. Access will be restricted to specific IP addresses and data will need to be stored in different places to ensure legal compliance.

KR3 will allow AIMES to simulate a Multi-Cloud Deployment, which will help the business to Evaluate Performance; Evaluate Legal Compliance and Evaluate Security.

KR4 will provide an intermediator to provision multi-cloud native services where interoperability between CSPs has been addressed.

Expected benefits/ improvements using DECIDE tools:

Simulation of Multi-Cloud deployments [KR3] and in consequence optimization patterns from [KR2] will allow for a cost effective way of seeing how a certain application performs in a multi-cloud setting. This will reduce costs in regards to devising the best approach for the implementation of an eHealth Service.

The ACSmI [KR4] solution also brings into the focus the availability of a cross border European cloud provision which address interoperability across clouds at scale.

Management of a cloud environment within a traditional CSP has its own challenges, without having to work with another technology and another CSP. The DECIDE Framework [KR1] puts into place mechanisms to allow for easy deployment from a DevOps perspective, and that of the CSP.