22C/ NHS Staffpassport; Based on Evernym Verity built by Sitekit/Condatis; A 12 month experience
NHS Staff Passport - Based on Evernym Verity built by Sitekit/Condatis - A 12 month experience
Thursday 22C
Convener: Chris Eckl, CTO, Condatis; Richard Astley, Architect, Condatis
Notes-taker(s): Chris Eckl, CTO, Condatis; Richard Astley, Architect, Condatis
Tags for the session - technology discussed/ideas considered:
Staff passporting, Evernym Verity, Condatis Staff passport, Truu
Discussion notes, key understandings, outstanding questions, observations, and, if appropriate to this discussion: action items, next steps:
The NHS Digital Staff Passport is a collaboration between Evernym, Truu, Condatis, and Sitekit built for the British National Health Service Digital Staff Passport system. The NHS is the largest healthcare organisation globally, and this is a substantial commercial collaboration for the healthcare service, pushing to provide a vendor-agnostic solution. This solution is currently the world's most significant ongoing deployment of Self-Sovereign Identity with 81 different agents within a trusted ecosystem.
The NHS is an incredibly complex multi-organisational system with nearly 400 organisations across the UK. Each NHS Trust is responsible for providing care for different districts across Britain. Each Trust is an independent employer for healthcare professionals, which became a challenge during the current global healthcare crisis as NHS Trusts needed to deploy staff to different locations across the country rapidly.
Part of the NHS's long-term plan is to enable staff to move from one location to another, one employer to another, even temporarily. The solution drastically reduces the time it takes to move staff records from one employer to another.
The Digital Staff Passport (DSP) is based on the foundations and concepts formulated by UK healthcare physician Manny Nijjar, the founder of Truu. Manny had done a lot of work and planning into the project over the past five years to inform the actual requirements, such as:
Right to work checks
Barring and disclosure checks which the home office issues
Moving training records and certification to work with vulnerable groups
Movement of staff credentials from one employer to another
Licenses to practice
Specialisations
Bank checks
The clinician's end-user experience.
The DSP was built as a rapid response to the global healthcare crisis and is based on the Evernym stack on Hyperledger Aries with Verity agents. We deployed one issuer and one verifier for every organisation available, run on Microsoft Azure. Each HR team gets onboarded to a directory, and we re-used Staff Identity already in place in the NHS and then issued the DSP to the moving consultants.
The DSP removes the requirement for clinicians to re-prove their credentials that have already been verified by certified trainers, medical schools, the General Medical Council (registry for all medical practitioners. Within the healthcare setting, an education piece still needs to be carried out for end users. While people understand how payment wallets work, there is still a lack of understanding of how a general identity wallet can work. Since the vaccine rollout, we enhanced the solution to include a vaccinator credential which proves a specific staff member can carry out vaccinations for patients.
Core team: Truu, Evernym, Sitekit and Condatis.
Truu on pre-work in getting us here, collaboration set up initially for the hackathon but then chose to take this live. After the first wave in March, Truu was working on the foundations of the staff passport solution on the Evernym platform already.
Condatis is a partner of Evernym, and we carried out several PoC's, one was also on the Microsoft SIOP stack as a method of doing this but is not the entire solution. The current live solution is built on Evernym.
Together, all the companies aligned with the same vision to deliver on the five years of work that Truu has done.
Project key learnings:
Truu developed a consultant-centric wallet.
The health engagement for Sitekit.
For Condatis, the whole concept of abstracting a staff passport to a middleware. We learned a lot about interoperability.
Condatis proposes a handoff protocol with a standard QR code that allows the user to decide which wallet to use and issue to or present from.
Condatis is currently developing a similar staff passport for the nuclear sector in the UK.
For more information on the Beta Digital Staff Passport, visit https://beta.staffpassports.nhs.uk/.
Slides: Condatis IIW32 NHS Digital Staffpassport Learnings (slideshare.net)
