Kainos named a finalist in the Microsoft Partner of the Year Awards

I am delighted to announce that Kainos has been named a finalist for the Microsoft 2021 Cloud-Native App Development Partner of the Year Award! What a fantastic achievement and brilliant way to recognise the vision and capability of the combined forces of Kainos, Microsoft and NHS Digital. With the power of Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS), we were able to develop the NHS App – a solution built to transform the provision of accessible digital health services in England.

Designed to be the digital front-door for NHS services, the NHS App provides secure, fully integrated and highly accessible patient-centric services to up to 40 million people in England using smartphone apps. The NHS App enables appointments to be booked across 7,500 general practitioners, repeat prescriptions to be ordered, medical records to be viewed, and more recently it has been extended to provide access to COVID-19 vaccination passports – all made possible through cloud-native tooling and practices.

The success and scale of the NHS App – particularly its role in helping combat the COVID-19 pandemic - has seen demand dramatically increase with over 9.2m patients accessing the NHS App in the last year [to July 2021] representing an annual increase of 912%. The NHS App was designed to treat a worsening technological headache – to provide fully integrated, highly accessible and user-centric services to citizens through smartphone apps. The app was the first platform to integrate the four major GP supply systems, as well as being the first to integrate with NHS login.

It’s been really inspiring to watch the Kainos team collaborate with Microsoft and NHS Digital in making the NHS App a real success, and achieve increased traction in digital healthcare. The team went on to assist NHS Digital with the development of additional services, including Find your NHS number and Isolation Note and play a central role in the digital COVID-19 response in Northern Ireland alongside HSCNI, where it deployed critical contact tracing and vaccine management systems. Kainos continues to work with Microsoft in preparing the NHS App for its key COVID-19 recovery role which will likely see active users swell to over 25m.

Kevin Harris, Cloud Native Architect for Microsoft sums up the relationship perfectly: “The two-way relationship with Kainos is the biggest thing for me. The NHS App is a great showcase of the scale you can get with cloud compute in the context of Azure. With Kainos it’s all about iterating and always looking forward. I get to learn a lot on my side, and I think they learn a lot on their side, so together we get to scale each other up, which is awesome.”

Partnering with Microsoft on this very tangible project has been a fantastic opportunity, so to receive global recognition is a real highlight for Kainos. Our partnership with Microsoft continues to grow as we collaborate and deliver more projects spanning multiple sectors and geographies. In the past year alone, we have developed further competency alignment and achieved advanced specialisations across Kubernetes on Azure, Windows & SQL Migration and (one of only a handful globally) Linux/OSS DB Migrations. I am excited at the opportunity ahead of us as we scale our business, and I am confident the best is yet to come!