30.08.13
North West consortium launches new PACS contract
A new Picture Archive and Communications System (PACS) will speed up care and cut costs for a consortium of 11 trusts across Cheshire and Merseyside.
The contract with Carestream UK will run for five years, with the option to extend for a further five. It replaces contracts terminated under the National Programme for IT (NPfIT).
Clinicians will be able to access and share digital images quickly and securely between trusts, saving approximately one hour per patient needed to be reviewed between sites. Savings on access costs are also expected as data is now held in a vendor neutral archive (VNA).
Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University Hospitals Trust (RLBUHT) – one of the 11 trusts – has installed 30 new triple screened radiology reporting workstations, 25 new monitors, re-integrated over 90 x-ray and scanning machines into the new PACS, and trained 1,500 staff to use the new systems.
Dr Peter Rowlands, consultant radiologist at RLBUHT and clinical lead for the PACS procurement said: “With a large number of trusts within the Merseyside region, patients are frequently required to attend different hospital sites for certain types of treatment or services and sometimes patients have had studies carried out, where there is no specialist available to interpret the results.
“Historically this has meant that the sharing of patient notes and images, between the hospital sites, has been slow and costly. The new PACS will overcome this issue by enabling images to be shared, quickly, efficiently, securely and cost effectively.”
“Access has been reduced to seconds, rather than minutes or longer as was previously the case. We often suffered queues and sometimes downloading was an overnight event, rather than in real-time.
“Our strategy is to move all patient notes and correspondence to the VNA over time. We will do the same for the trust’s electronic patient record (EPR) as it develops, so that all our storage is in one place. We chose to do this because it fitted with our ongoing strategy for overall data management and exploitation of Big Data within the trust.
“We had no direct relationship with our previous PACS supplier, which inevitably caused us some issues. We didn’t know what had been procured for us, which meant we were always several software releases behind, for instance; whereas now we’ll be closer to the supplier and hence the latest version of software.”
The trusts in the consortium are: Aintree University Hospitals, Alder Hey Children’s, Clatterbridge Centre for Oncology, Liverpool Community Health, Liverpool Heart and Chest Hospital, Liverpool Women’s, Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University Hospitals, Southport and Ormskirk Hospital, St Helens and Knowsley Teaching Hospitals, Walton Centre, and Warrington and Halton Hospitals.
For more comment from Dr Rowlands, see the Sept/Oct edition of National Health Executive.
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