NHS England Terminology Server environments

The NHS England Terminology Server is made up of technical components including 4 FHIR servers. Each FHIR Server can be seen as an end point, or place where people and other software applications will connect to access and author content (terminologies and classifications).

This server is similar to a traditional development server.

Most content will be authored off-system and provided to the Terminology Server from systems like TRUD and Mauro. However, users with the relevant permissions can create new FHIR resources (CodeSystems, ConceptMaps and ValueSets) or new communities.

They can use the authoring server to control access to these resources as they are created. Then, when they are ready to make this content publicly available they can have this content promoted to the Staging Server. 

This server is similar to a traditional test server.

When content is created, either in the authoring server or when the latest Data Dictionary content is uploaded. This updated content can be loaded into the Staging Server so it can be assured in a production like environment before it is promoted to production.

In using a staging sever the content owner can check they are happy with the updated content and check how it will impact on other content before it is loaded to the Production Server. 

Once the content owner is happy with the content in the Staging Server it can be promoted to production.

There are two Production Servers.

• Production (Analytic) or Production 1
• Production (Clinical) or Production 2

These servers provide essentially the same service, to give users and applications access to content, but have different audiences. 

While terminology servers are very good at handling requests for lots of information, some requests can create very large queries, which can then slow the system down. The Terminology Server is designed to be used as a back-end for other applications, and some of these applications may be used for direct care so cannot afford to be slowed down. We therefore operate two independent production severs to ensure clinicians and other care workers can continue to use the dedicated clinical sever while queries are being run on the analytic server.