Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust is now live with McKesson Cardiology™; a solution that provides an image archiving system to facilitate the sharing and review of cath and echo images, ECGs and Echo procedure reporting to enhance workflow efficiency.
The McKesson cardiovascular information system CVIS replaced the Trust’s previous imaging system. Since go-live in late November 2016, the Trust has used the new CVIS to transform the workflows involved in sharing and reporting of cath and echo images across Cornwall, reducing reporting time by 50%.
Duncan Sleeman, Senior Chief Cardiac Physiologist, Royal Cornwall Hospital, commented, “We are located on a peninsula: with our cardiac physiologist team, the nursing staff and the consultant staff all in separate locations. With the previous system there were many constraints that caused difficulties particularly in highly time-sensitive scenarios. Communication was slow and sending reports from one location to another, particularly to the major tertiary surgical centre that is 90 miles away, was an arduous manual process.”
“Now, with McKesson Cardiology we have a web-based system that enables the extended teams to see all of the patient information including images and reports securely, in real-time,whilst in clinics and on the wards. It is a time efficient and convenient solution that has completely revolutionised the way in which cardiology services, both within the Trust and throughout the wider community, are being delivered.”
The implementation team at McKesson and Royal Cornwall Hospital reviewed the ‘out of the box’ version of the McKesson Echo system and worked together to tailor the software to Cornwall’s specific needs, which included adding user-specific terminology to the reports.
“It became very apparent when we were undertaking our training that McKesson’s Echo Solution is built from an end user’s perspective, by somebody who knows what it is like to sit in a room for 7 1Ž2 hours a day and perform 10 Echocardiograms,” Duncan added.
“Each of the consultants spent time with the McKesson team adding the phrases and terminology we use regularly to customise the system for each user’s preference.”
“It was completely and utterly user friendly, from design and installation to training,” Duncan concluded.
Maureen Gardner, McKesson Clinical Lead commented, “McKesson is delighted to have added our Echo Reporting and ECG storage to the existing Haemodynamic Monitoring and Cath image management at Royal Cornwall Hospital. The McKesson Implementation process follows Prince2 format and a key factor in our success is our Clinical personnel, all with previous hands-on experience in Cardiology. Having a working knowledge of Echocardiography and the limitations and time-constraints on the busy department allowed us to tailor the Solution to the Royal Cornwall workflow.”
