Tags: PACS

Kingston Hospital NHS Foundation Trust Engages SynApps to Migrate Medical Images to Vendor-Neutral Archive

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The staged repatriation of 19Tb of patient radiology images from a BT data centre will see the content held in an interim in-house PACS from Sectra, then replicated to a SynApps/EMC VNA as part of the Trust’s broader EPR plans

Maidenhead, UK – November 27th, 2013 – SynApps Solutions, the content management solutions company, has won a major medical image migration contract with Kingston Hospital NHS Foundation Trust. SynApps will repatriate 19Tb of radiology content to the Trust’s premises, where it will be held in an interim Picture Archiving and Communications System before being replicated to a SynApps/EMC vendor-neutral content archive.

Currently, Kingston Hospital’s medical image archive library is hosted in a BT data centre. Following the end of the NHS’s National Programme for IT (NPfIT) arrangements, this hosting contract will end in July 2015. SynApps, which will drive the project, is working in partnership with PACS specialist Sectra to repatriate the off-site medical image library. Work will be underway by January 2014. Transferring 19Tb of content over the secure N3 NHS network will take a long time; the plan is a migration rate of 2Tb a month.

“2015 is not only our deadline for leaving BT, but also for replacing the PACS contract, so we needed a decent safety margin to ensure we had all our images back in time,” explains Norman Harling, Deputy Director of Information Management & Technology at the Trust. “We’ve been sending images to BT since 2006, with volumes of around 250,000 radiology investigations a year, so this is not a small job.

“Once we have extracted the content from the existing PACS and moved contract, we will release a lot of cost – upwards of £250,000 a year,” he adds. It is hoped that the repatriation will be complete six months ahead of schedule, allowing early access to these savings.

The interim PACS platform provided by Sectra will act as a working store for the medical image content until the Trust’s longer-term PACS strategy has been finalised. In the meantime the Trust will replicate the medical image content to a SynApps vendor-neutral archive (VNA) platform. This will allow the content to be managed more intelligently and incorporated within the Trust’s wider plans for electronic patient records (EPR). (The SynApps/EMC VNA platform caters for a broad range of content types and introduces sophisticated indexing and search and retrieval facilities.)

“We see the SynApps VNA as a building block in our strategy for EPR,” Mr Harling explains. “What we don’t want to do is just keep growing our medical image store indefinitely.” A more joined-up content strategy will bring additional benefits, he notes.

“At the moment, specialities such as ophthalmology, cardiology and endoscopy each have their own discrete databases. In parallel to the PACS archive project we are exploring how we can bring these content stores into the VNA to open up access.”

Kingston Hospital NHS Foundation Trust already works closely with other healthcare providers including St George’s Hospital in Tooting and The Royal Marsden Hospital in Sutton, sharing radiology content. “Our plan is to harness EMC/SynApps’ cross-document sharing capabilities to create fuller patient records that can be readily accessed by different specialities,  and other acute and community services,” Mr Harling says.

Of the choice of SynApps, he comments, “SynApps has a strong reputation for migrating data and combining it using a vendor-neutral platform. They were also willing to do an initial trail of the migration, which gave us confidence in the outcome. I’ve been very impressed with their technical knowledge, their understanding of our needs and their willingness to work flexibly. This includes managing the relationship with Sectra.”

SynApps recently announced a strategic partnership with Sectra, which will see the two companies collaborate on specialist content migration projects for NHS Trusts.

About SynApps Solutions

SynApps is an independent services and solutions company specialising in Enterprise Content Management (ECM) technologies. In the healthcare sector, SynApps in conjunction with EMC, is a pioneer in advanced vendor-neutral archives. These have the potential to transform the way NHS Trusts share medical image files with other healthcare providers and to accelerate their progress towards single digital patient records. Find out more at synapps-solutions.com or follow us on Twitter @SynAppsSol

Kings Fund – October 15th – Unveiling Sectra Open Archive with SynApps VNA

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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)

Prestigious UK IT Group Intellect Agrees On The Need For An ‘End To Silos’ In NHS Informatics

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“If you think about it, the NHS deals with over a million patients every 36 hours and over 250 million interactions a year. Is a paper and postage system that can take months the most effective way of providing care today? In any other industry that volume of interaction would be ripe for digital transformation.”

This is a quote from an expert called Jon Lindberg, who is associate director for healthcare at Intellect, the official ‘trade body’ of the entire UK IT industry, representing over 800 member companies who collectively contribute 10% to the entire national GDP.

The quote is from a blog he wrote last week called, ‘A digital health service we deserve’. In it, he summarises some of the main themes from a new Intellect study that addresses the self-same issues we have looked at in our series of blogs: how to use technology in one part of the NHS that we know works and extend it to help other areas, in order to moving to the kind of ‘paperless NHS’ the DoH has made an official target.

According to the Intellect report, The NHS Information Evolution patient information is “buried deep in silos.” What is needed is a practical set of solutions that will unlock the data and make it truly portable, open up the NHS to a wider range of technology providers; as well as introduce the mobile and connected technologies a 21st century health service is looking for.

The NHS needs to modernise, but to get there the NHS must do two things: punch holes through those silos of information, while simultaneously push for more open standards.

Key to all this is a new take on the underlying information architecture of the NHS. For too long, says the study, systems and services designed and implemented locally often work well, but end up burying information, making it inaccessible to those on the outside. A much better idea is an architecture that allows information to flow horizontally and follow the patient.

This looks to be a very useful new approach. I am also pleased that Intellect has picked up on the same cues we have spotted – which is to use PACS standards as the basis for a new form of EPR based on the proven Vendor Neutral Archive (VNA) approach. In Intellect’s case, it has a wider remit, so addressing more than one ‘silo’ – but the idea is the same: the route to national NHS IT systems that work is to go bottom up, but with a strategic goal in mind.

What do you think? Could this work in your Trust?

UKRC – 2013 See you There!

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Join us at the annual UKRC event in Liverpool on Monday through Wednesday, June 10-12.

UKRC is a three day multidisciplinary Congress covering all aspects of diagnostic imaging and oncology. Whether your interests are in clinical service delivery, management, informatics or research, the Congress has exciting sessions and presentations to offer.

On Wednesday at 10:30, SynApps’s Mark Winstone will present Royal Liverpool & Broadgreen University Hospitals NHS Trusts’ ‘VNA to EPR’ journey.  Join Mark in Lecture Theatre 1 of the Exhibition Hall.