A consortium of trusts around the south coast of England has entered into an agreement that aims to ease the flow of millions of crucial images across hospitals, helping healthcare professionals in the region to make informed diagnoses for patients.
The Salisbury, Wight and South Hampshire NHS trusts, or SWASH consortium, uses imaging technology to manage 1.3 million patient examinations each year as patients move across the area. SWASH has now renewed its contract with Sectra, which since 2013 had been providing hospitals in the consortium with four PACS platforms and an underpinning cross-platform technology that has allowed the trusts to stream images between each other.
A new eight-year contract agreed at the beginning of 2020 will now see a single PACS delivered across all trusts, hosted in the cloud, meaning the removal of the technical complexity previously required to support a single view of patient imaging across the trusts.
PACS manager at Portsmouth Hospitals NHS Trust Mark Gardner said: “We have broken down a lot of barriers over the last seven years by using Sectra’s software to allow us to view imaging across our trusts. And having a consistent system in place has proven useful for consultants and junior doctors moving across our trusts.
“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 vast amounts of data needed to make important diagnoses.”
Picture: A Sectra PACS is expected to allow the SWASH consortium to manage a further 450,000 patient examinations a year.
Published on page 10 of the April 2020 issue of RAD Magazine.