Plans for Open Access to BNF apps

In 2012 we were asked by NICE to provide access via HONNI to the NICE BNF app.  It was already available to NHS staff in the rest of the UK.  NICE did not have the resources to manage accounts for HSC staff in Northern Ireland and so the Medical & HSC Library staff agreed to look at managing this locally.

We explored the devolved authentication method using Open Athens.  After much work it turned out that the app platform was unable to process federated logins by this method as all the likely authentication use cases had not been considered in the design of the app.  It is, therefore, not possible for us to enable access to the BNF app via HONNI at this time.

The good news, however, is that NICE is well aware that open access is the ideal future for the BNF apps and are working with the BNF publisher to develop open access apps that will be available UK-wide in 2015.