MESH is an acronym for “Message Exchange for Social Care and Health”.
It has been live since 2015 and is an evolution of an earlier service called Data Transfer Service (DTS).
It provides the ability to share data directly between health and care organisations and is the nationally recognised mechanism for this method of data sharing.
Some usage is ad-hoc but also much is event driven, such as birth notifications from National Event Monitoring Service.
It is secure and can deal with very large files (up to 50 gigabytes) – NHS Mail is 35 megabytes.
MESH is high volume and handles up to 60 million messages a month.
Users can send a file to someone’s GP, by looking up their GP using their NHS number and other details.
There are 3 “sub-products” of MESH - the API, the Client, and the UI (User Interface).
The API is aimed for organisations with significant developer resource wishing to send system-to-system files, in a messaging product that offers secure transfer of large volumes of files.
The Client is aimed for organisations with some developer resource wishing to send system-to-system files. The MESH Client is a server-installed messaging product that offers secure transfer of large volumes of files.
MESH UI is ideal for organisations without developer resource, wishing to send large files peer-to-peer. The MESH UI is a simple web-based messaging product that offers secure file transfer. Unlike NHS Mail, MESH UI offers file transfer up to 100 megabytes.
More information can be found here : Message Exchange for Social Care and Health - NHS Digital