Join Mark Winstone and the SynApps healthcare team for this 30-minute webinar on December 6th at 2:30 GMT to discuss the journey from VNA repatriation via EDM to Content Sharing (XDS).
This is a re-run of Mark’s talk which he recently presented at the King’s Fund London event, ‘The Pacs Repatriation Journey‘.
Join like-minded healthcare and IT professionals for a webinar that charts VNAs, and demystifies the options available, the opportunities and the challenges.
On Tuesday, October 15th SynApps, Sectra, EMC Documentum and NHS Supply Chain will gather to present ‘PACS Repatriation – Underway? Completed? Not off the block yet? – and use the event to unveil the Sectra Open Archive with SynApps VNA.
The event targets NHS Trusts irrespective of where they are in their PACS repatriation process and will discuss the options available and unveil the opportunities to move to an Interim or Trust-wide Vendor Neutral Archive (VNA).
Attendees will also hear from Kingston Hospital NHS Foundation Trust on its decisin to deploy Sectra Open Archive with SynApps VNA and join discussions on the considerations for cross document sharing, XDS and XCA.
EMC Documentum’s Jean VanVuuren will present an optional post-lunch presentation entitled ‘Towards a Trust-Wide VNA’.
Nubmers are limited for this event. To book your place please email Gary Britnell (gary.britnell@10.128.0.8)
The deployment of a VNA (vendor neutral archive) based platform as a first step to a proper, working EPR (electronic patient record) at a major Liverpool hospital is definitely a first for British health informatics.
Let’s look in a bit more detail at what shaped this decision by the pioneering Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University Hospitals NHS Trust.
The driver for considering VNA was, notably, not anything to do with building an EPR. In fact, it was much more prosaic – it was due to the need to replace an ageing PACS imaging system.
That need became more acute in the period when the NHS Connecting for Health National Programme for IT was introduced, says the Royal. Its response: its technology upgrade might need to go much wider.
The Trust decided on a truly open platform so it could go beyond the scope of PACS and store and manage other content alongside medical images. “To maximise the benefits, we decided to integrate our VNA plans with our electronic document and records management strategy, using the same infrastructure,” is the view of the Trust’s CIO, James Norman.
You will understand what a privilege it us for us to work with the Trust’s team. The Trust is one of the top NHS teaching institutions in the UK, with well-established links to the University of Liverpool, Liverpool John Moores University and international institutions. Each year the Trust sees more than half a million people in its outpatient department and it deals with around 150,000 emergency patients and day case admissions. So the fact that this size of NHS Trust has selected our technology to meet its future plans is a genuine honour.
The Trust, incidentally, selected our VNA because of our experience and our unique relationship with IT giant EMC – the acknowledged market leader in enterprise document management. We have enormous experience with its system, the Documentum Enterprise Content Management suite.
We hope this engagement is the first of many examples of using VNA as the way to a true EPR. Something tells me it is – even though there is a lot of work to do in order to get there.
We’ve talked in these blogs before about the potential application of your familiar PACS systems to the problem of building the practical, easy to use EPR (electronic patient records) we need to get to create a true ‘paperless NHS’.
Well, I am delighted to tell you that one Trust has embarked on such a project.
We all know that ‘the Holy Grail’ in healthcare is when we get to a point where patient services can be provided seamlessly and with continuity across any combination of service providers – from acute and mental health Trusts to community GP practices, pop-up clinics and even via the caregiver in the field.
The open standards-based vendor-neutral archive, which is about to go live, will store digital medical images and other electronic patient notes so that these can be accessed from anywhere and shared remotely in a fraction of the time taken previously. The Trust will also share the VNA facility with other Trusts and healthcare providers who are running out of time to implement a VNA
Maidenhead, UK – April 15th 2013 – In the next few weeks, the Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University Hospitals NHS Trust will go live with a full-blown vendor-neutral archive solution from SynApps Solutions, the content management solutions company. Ultimately this will give the Trust’s clinicians – and external healthcare partners – instantaneous access to patients’ medical images and associated case notes at the point of need.
The Trust is one of the largest and busiest in the North of England, with an annual budget of over £400 million. Although the original trigger for implementing a VNA was the need to replace a proprietary picture archiving and communication system (PACS), following the breakup of the NHS Connecting for Health IT programme, the Royal’s plans for the technology go much wider.
James Norman, CIO at the Trust, explains: “We decided on a truly open platform so we could go beyond the scope of PACS and store and manage other content alongside medical images. To maximise the benefits, we decided to integrate our VNA plans with our electronic document and records management strategy, using the same infrastructure.”
The Trust selected SynApps for the VNA implementation based on the company’s experience and its status as an EMC-preferred VNA implementation partner. Its wider ambitions are linked to a new state-of-the-art hospital it plans to build. Before it moves into the new premises in 2017, the Trust wants to be ‘paperlight’ in the way it captures and manages patient records and other content.
The EMC VNA solution from SynApps, which is based on the leading Documentum Enterprise Content Management platform, is crucial to this strategy. Says Mr Norman, “We needed a future-proof solution that uses standards-based formats so that the content can be accessed by new systems as they come along, as well as those used by partner organisations.”
The Royal also plans to open up its VNA facility for other Trusts to use, as a cloud-based service. “We are one of the larger Trusts in the country and not everyone is at the same point in their journey towards implementing a VNA,” he explains. “With the SynApps solution, we have the ability to scale the system right out and help other Trusts looking for a VNA solution as a service for their medical content.”
More than 80 million of the Royal’s medical images have been migrated across to the new VNA to date, where they are stored as intelligent DICOM digital files. Once in the VNA, clinicians will be able to call up images from any location, on any device, in a fraction of the time taken previously.
“This means medical staff will have more time to answer patient questions, and explain a diagnosis and related treatment plans, improving the quality of care,” Mr Norman concludes. “It will also mean they can see more patients.”
About the Trust
The Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University Hospitals NHS Trust is one of the largest and busiest hospital trusts in the North of England, with an annual budget exceeding £400 million. It delivers services across two sites and three hospitals, the Royal Liverpool University Hospital, Broadgreen Hospital and Liverpool University Dental Hospital, and employs more than 5,500 people.
Each year the Trust sees more than half a million people in its outpatient department and deals with around 150,000 emergency patients and day case admissions. It is one of the top teaching trusts in the UK with well-established links to the University of Liverpool, Liverpool John Moores University and international institutions. In 2013 work will begin on a new £425 million state of the art Royal Liverpool University Hospital. To find out more about the Trust, visit www.rlbuht.nhs.uk .