Three NHS hospital trusts in Dorset have chosen to use a cloud based image sharing solution to support clinical staff at the point of care.
University Hospitals Dorset (UHD), Dorset County Hospitals (DCH) and Dorset HealthCare University NHS Foundation Trust have engaged SynApps Solutions, J4Care and Open Text to deploy a proactive image sharing system based on a transient use of its vendor neutral archive (VNA) – in which medical images are stored with a standard format and interface.
SynApps said the trio were selected as they could deliver an architecture based on messaging rather than image pooling.
Work on the implementation is to begin this month and is expected to be complete for core organisations and radiology within a year. It will enable proactive image sharing, cross-network reporting, a single view of multimedia data, and image sharing beyond the South East 3 imaging network.
Workarounds and duplication
Peter Gill, chief informatics officer at UHD, commented: “Previously, we relied on lots of manual workarounds with no effective information flow, which meant images taken at one site would not necessarily be available in another department, leading to duplicate images being taken. There are up to 20 clinical departments outside of radiology that rely on imagery and scans so being able to proactively share them is vital.”
He added: “Access to older images taken across our network improves diagnostics enormously because we can more accurately track symptoms, such as the growth of a lump. SynApps gives us a viewing system that will render all images in a single portal, built on a database of metadata, which can bring together historic images.”
