NHSmail Migration For Better Collaboration & Care Delivery

We had the pleasure of working with One Health Lewisham, an organisation that was created to fill in the gaps in Primary Care in and around the Lewisham area. Growing rapidly, One Health has grown to around 150 employees and delivers a variety of services to practices, primary care networks, and patients. They are proud to empower patient care across Lewisham, delivering urgent care, home visiting, NHS health checks, and a virtual community ward amongst many other services. OHL was established to provide primary and community care services to residents as well as several 'at scale' services for practices.

Due to One Health Lewisham’s rapid expansion, their implementation of Microsoft 365 became a source of inefficiency across the organisation, particularly when collaborating with Primary Care colleagues to deliver clinical services. They reached out to Kratos IT to deliver a migration project that would move their organisation from Microsoft 365 to the central NHSmail service; the same service being used by most Primary Care organisations across England and Wales. The migration needed to ensure a smooth transition of service to ensure impact on patient services was kept to a minimum, and their obligations to partners and patients could continue to be met.

The project commenced with a strategic call between Kratos IT, One Health Lewisham's CIO, and their existing MS 365 Administrator to define success criteria for this migration. Together, we drafted a high-level plan to achieve these objectives which Kratos IT then took away to formulate a project plan which would deliver the desired result on time, and within budget.


To ensure the client could maintain operations during the migration, we established a migration process that allowed the new and old systems to operate concurrently. Over a period of six months, all users and data were successfully migrated to the new system, with additional measures in place to forward emails from old addresses to the new system's user accounts.


As we approached the project's final stage, which involved discontinuing the old Microsoft email system, we completed a final verification process to ensure all mail and data had been successfully transferred, and that the necessary data retention periods were adhered to.

The key need that One Health Lewisham had, was to greatly improve their ability to collaborate securely and efficiently with their colleagues across primary care. The migration enabled this and created streamlined processes for administration that saved time, whilst also bringing One Health Lewisham’s systems under the security and governance assurance mechanisms offered by NHS Digital.

Following this migration, our Service Desk team assumed responsibility for the local administration requirements of NHSmail. This ensures consistent adherence to best practice policies and processes enhancing operational security, particularly regarding onboarding and offboarding users from the platform. Additionally, this transition has alleviated the administrative workload from One Health Lewisham’s internal team members, allowing them to focus on what they do best; delivering patient care to the borough of Lewisham.