A consortium of NHS trusts around the south coast of England has signed an eight year contract renewal with Sectra for its imaging technology.
The deal means the trusts part of the group will seamlessly share and access half a million more images across the region and make them available when and where they are needed.
Its picture archiving and communication system (PACS) manages 1.3 million patient exams each year for the Salisbury, Wight and South Hampshire Domain Trusts (SWASH) consortium and has been utilised since 2013. The new deal will see additional 450,000 patient exams a year managed through the system and that are also integrated with the trusts’ individual EPR.
Dr Mark Griffiths, paediatric radiologist and clinical lead for the SWASH “I can already see a full patient history from any of the trusts involved – an achievement made possible during the past seven years. But our requirements are considerable to keep that running in an orderly fashion across multiple routers and a range of complex and varied infrastructure.”
“The new contract will allow us to simplify our utilisation of the technology, and will mean that maintenance, upgrades, patching and even cyber security will now be much more easily managed.”
Dr Griffiths said the group now has an opportunity to improve access for multi-disciplinary teams and it means that any historic challenges where bandwidth between trusts may be clogged at peak times will be overcome.
Mark Gardner, PACS manager at Portsmouth Hospitals NHS Trust “Now we are taking this a step further by moving to a single instance of PACS across the entire SWASH consortium.”
“This will remove a reliance on external network links, and improve performance further, overcoming any bandwidth limitations when our professionals are obtaining and interacting with large imaging files and the associated vast amounts of data needed to make important diagnoses.”
Jane Rendall, managing director UK and Ireland at Sectra “SWASH has achieved a tremendous amount working as a region during the past seven years so that patient imaging can securely flow to whichever hospital that patient visits. As regional NHS collaborations now rapidly become the default procurement mechanism in the imaging space, they can learn a lot from pioneers at SWASH who continue to build on their strategic view led by clinical and diagnostic professionals and senior individuals including chief information officers.”
