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gewg_ writes:

Ulitzer's Business Wire reports:

The Spine -- a collection of national applications, services, and directories -- connects clinicians, patients and local service providers throughout England to essential national services, such as electronic prescriptions and patient health records.

Spine is used by more than 20,000 organizations that provide health care across England, including primary and secondary care sites, pharmacies, opticians and dentists. Riak, the open source distributed database, is key to providing the reliability and scalability for the platform to drive efficiency and improve patient care.

The NHS' move to revamp the Spine, in a major project led by England's Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC), was driven by the need for a scalable, resilient and flexible system that would also result in cost-savings for the organization.

With these requirements in mind, the NHS selected Riak Enterprise, the commercial version of Basho's distributed open source, highly available NoSQL database, to support the transition and implementation of the new Spine. Basho and the HSCIC collaborated throughout to ensure the technical knowledge of both organizations was reflected in enhancements to Riak and the wider project itself.

El Reg's coverage notes that the old system used a (closed-source, proprietary) Oracle product and the new software is NoSQL running on an open-source stack. It also notes the decision was made in October 2013.

Robert Pogson's commentary is also interesting.