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 .