Edinburgh, Scotland — 3 September 2024. Ratebay Care Technologies today announced the launch of a comprehensive digital transformation programme, backed by £2.4m in investment over 18 months, to progressively migrate its clinical IT infrastructure from on-premises legacy systems to Microsoft Azure cloud services.
The programme, led by Head of IT Mark Tennant and Cloud Infrastructure Engineer Rachel Burns, will affect both Ratebay's internal infrastructure and the managed services it provides to NHS GP practice clients.
Like many healthcare IT organisations, Ratebay operates a hybrid environment where modern cloud services coexist with legacy on-premises systems that cannot be immediately decommissioned. Several clinical systems currently in use by Ratebay's NHS GP practice clients were originally built for Windows Server 2008 R2 environments and have not been migrated to newer platforms due to application vendor dependencies and the complexity of clinical data migration in regulated settings.
"The reality of NHS IT is that you cannot simply turn off a system that holds patient records, even if the underlying server is end-of-life," said Mark Tennant. "Our digital transformation programme is specifically designed to manage this transition carefully — maintaining the continuity of legacy clinical systems while progressively building the cloud infrastructure that will eventually replace them."
The transformation programme is structured across three phases:
Expand Azure infrastructure — migrate file storage, enhance Entra ID configuration, complete MFA rollout across all administrative accounts (currently in progress for legacy admin accounts), deploy Azure Defender for Cloud, establish ExpressRoute resilience.
Migrate HL7 integration services to Azure-hosted Mirth Connect infrastructure. Establish FHIR R4 API layer alongside legacy HL7 v2 interfaces. Begin phased retirement of on-premises HL7 integration server once cloud equivalent is validated.
Work with application vendors to migrate legacy clinical systems from Windows Server 2008 R2 to supported platforms. Formal decommission planning for on-premises infrastructure. Target completion: Q1 2026 subject to vendor and clinical client readiness.
As part of Phase 1, Ratebay is completing a multi-factor authentication rollout across all staff and administrative accounts. The majority of accounts are now MFA-enabled. A small number of legacy administrative accounts — used by older integration processes — remain exempt pending system updates that will be addressed in Phase 2. The rollout is being managed by Rachel Burns (r.burns@ratebay.co.uk).
"This programme represents the most significant investment in our infrastructure since we launched RateCare360. We're not just modernising for modernising's sake — we're building the foundation that will allow us to offer new capabilities to NHS clients over the coming years. The transition from legacy to cloud is a journey, not a switch, and we're committed to making it safely."
For media enquiries about the digital transformation programme, contact s.okafor@ratebay.co.uk. Technical enquiries should be directed to m.tennant@ratebay.co.uk.