The SWASH consortium of NHS trusts around the south coast of England has renewed its picture archiving and communication system (PACS) contract with Sectra for the next eight years.
Under the deal, the Salisbury, Wight and South Hampshire trusts will also begin to use a single, cloud based system that will provide a unified view of patient imaging.
It will also enable them to increase the number of patient examinations they manage from 1.3 million to 1.75 million per year, and to integrate the images into their individual electronic patient records.
Dr Mark Griffiths, paediatric radiologist and clinical lead for SWASH, said: “I can already see a full patient history from any of the trusts involved – an achievement made possible during the past seven years. But our requirements are considerable to keep that running in an orderly fashion across multiple routers and a range of complex and varied infrastructure.
“The new contract will allow us to simplify our utilisation of the technology, and will mean that maintenance, upgrades, patching and even cyber security will now be much more easily managed.
“And we have a strong opportunity to improve our access for multi-disciplinary teams which often occur concurrently. This means that any historic challenges where bandwidth between trusts may be clogged at peak times will be overcome.”
The SWASH trusts came together in 2013 to procure a new PACS system and have been using Sectra technology since then.
