8 NHS trusts across Greater Manchester are to adopt medical imaging technology from Sectra, following a new contract signed this month.
The platform aims to transform how healthcare teams access and review images, supporting up to four million examinations per year.
The first trust is to go live this year, with deployment staged across the eight trusts. The trusts joining the imaging network include Bolton NHS Foundation Trust, The Christie NHS Foundation Trust, Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust, The Northern Care Alliance NHS Group, Stockport NHS Foundation Trust, Tameside and Glossop Integrated Care NHS Foundation Trust and Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh NHS Foundation Trust.
Once live, the group will be able to share and have immediate access to x-rays, CT scans, ultrasound, MRI scans and an extensive range of other diagnostic images across the network of trusts.
Dr Rhidian Bramley, a clinical lead for the programme and consultant radiologist at The Christie NHS FT, said: “A single, unified record will help to avoid delays that come with manually transferring images between individual hospitals. It will help us to reduce variation in waiting times and improve equity in access.”
“For cancer this will help us to meet our objective to diagnose more patients at an earlier stage to help to save thousands more lives. And the platform itself will make a significant difference to professionals, providing modern tools to report images whilst allowing us to embrace emerging artificial intelligence and to support important programmes of research.”
Dr Rizwan Malik, interim divisional medical director at The Royal Bolton Hospital, said: “We will have a modern imaging system deployed region-wide that will enable us to liberate the geography of patient management, in keeping with how we practise medicine, where patients move from one site to another. In any multidisciplinary setting we can have a more informed meaningful discussion about a patient. And if they present out of hours, we don’t need to wait until the office opens in the morning to access their imaging.”
“New capabilities mean we can think more openly about delivering care for patients at sites convenient for them. And it will allow us to quickly access second opinions from colleagues across Greater Manchester whilst having greater access to peer review, and being able to make far more of the human resource available to us within the NHS.”
Raj Jain, chief executive of the Northern Care Alliance NHS Group, said: “Our vision wasn’t for a PACS system – this is a means to an end. The real vision is about how we want to take forward patient care. Our new approach will enable clinical communities and multi-disciplinary teams to come together around the patient in a way we presently can’t do. The PACS platform is an essential component to taking forward a new model of care in Greater Manchester, allowing digital images to form part of the core patient record and to create a holistic persona for the patient that our clinicians can use much more effectively than we have ever done before.”
