BJSS, in partnership with the Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC), has won the Big Data Project of the Year category in this year's TechSuccess Awards for the re-engineering of the NHS Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) data platform.

HES was originally conceived in the late 1980s, and provides data for a wide range of healthcare analysis for the NHS, government and supporting organisations. The enables access to secure analysis of health trends, performance benchmarks, academic research and international comparisons.

The project was delivered by BJSS and the HSCIC, and resulted in the entire system being re-written.  The 3.5 million lines of SQL code contained in HES were reduced by 97 per cent, while a 500-step manual process is now fully automated. This ‘next-generation’ version of HES is now operated and maintained by the HSCIC in-house, enabling work to be handled with increased efficiency while also delivering a significant reduction in operating costs.

Glynn Robinson, BJSS Managing Director, says: “We are thrilled that HES has been recognised by the Tech Success Awards as 2013’s Best Big Data Project. This is the second industry accolade for HES and it provides a glowing testament of the innovation, hard work and commitment which the combined BJSS and HSCIC teams demonstrated towards this delivery.”

The Tech Success Awards are an initiative of TechWeekEurope, a leading technology news and advice website. They celebrate successful IT projects in the UK across several categories.

Peter Judge, Editor of TechWeekEurope, adds: “The categories were fiercely contested and we spent weeks deciding who should make the short-list and then be awarded winners. We’re really pleased with the level of interest we had this year and I would like to praise all those that took part and to say well done to the winning companies. Your awards are very well deserved.”

In addition to re-engineering HES, BJSS is currently working with the HSCIC in developing the new NHS e-Referral Service, while also delivering the NHS Spine 2 messaging and secure database platform.