PCTs Benefit From Secure Nationwide System

13 Aug 2010

A secure remote working system which originated at four north london NHS primary care units (PCTs), has officially been rolled out across the country.

The Health Access System (HAS) is a new web-based system which has been developed by security firm Winfrasoft.

HAS is built on a platform which is widely used across the NHS - Microsoft Forefront Edge Gateway server platform, and is also connected to the government's new Connected for Health (CfH) smartcards.

The smartcards have been developed to control access to the confidential Care Records Service, but Winfrasoft has extended this use to allow PCTs access to local resources as well.

The Barnet, Enfield & Haringey Health Informatics Service (BEHHIS) decided to go with HAS, as it uses the existing platform and smartcard resources.

Perry Meyer, the senior project manager at NHS Enfield says, "Implementing such comprehensive and strong two-factor authentication from scratch would simply not be feasible for our PCTs, as it is expensive to implement and resource intensive to maintain."

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