The NHS Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC) has selected IT services and solutions provider Mastek to develop an identity and access management service.
The announcement comes as part of the NHS Spine re-procurement and Mastek claims that it will be one of the largest standards-based corporate identity management infrastructures in the world.
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The new project, dubbed Spine 2, will replace the existing infrastructure that was implemented as part of the ill-fated NHS National Programme for IT (NPfIT).
Mastek won the contract in July after the HSCIC assessed potential partners for agile development and technical capabilities, understanding and quality of work, the IT services firm said. This was reviewed against a controlled development framework over a 10-week period.
The project will cover credential identity management, authentication, credential issuance and access management for users and messaging endpoints.
The service will aim to provide a consistent framework for managing user identities across numerous environments to support the compliance needs of the HSCIC. Mastek said that its service will aim to improve the user experience and take advantage of new technologies that can, in turn, further enhance the service.
Joe Venkataramen, chairman of Mastek UK, said the HSCIC is a "major and highly valued client of Mastek" and was delighted that the firm was selected for the contract.
"We are also confident that in exploiting our deep domain knowledge and business model, we can both mitigate any risk and take considerable cost out of the process, so that money can then be re-deployed on front-line services," he said.
Earlier this month the NHS announced its selection of US developer Basho's open source database Riak to underpin its efforts to rebuild its Spine infrastructure.
Ovum analyst Laurent Lachal said the Riak NoSQL database would give the NHS better agile and technical capabilities.
