NHS completes London roll out of Pacs

Digital x-ray archiving is live across London's hospitals and will cover the rest of England by next year. The Department of Health has announced that the digital Picture Archiving and Communications System (Pacs), a key part of the NHS National Programme for IT, has gone live in every hospital trust in London and will be …

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm shame about the lack of choice and the additional cost

It is all well and good for NpFit to shout about the completion of this project, it is just a shame that the systems they are implementing cost more than buying the same system commercially from the original vendor, plus taking into account that many trusts were ready to purchase PACS systems 4 or more years ago but had to delay their purchase and accept the systems forced on them by NpFit,

Hmm not sure if this is really something to be proud of.

[Anonymous Coward]

Changing the requirements to meet the solution, eh?

Firstly, a big congrats for getting PACS installed in all the Trusts around London. Big (expensive) achievement that will benefit a lot of people (not just the vendors) and save a lot of money over the coming years (in not having to buy expensive film).

However, let’s look a little closer at some of the detail from the story...

“Healthcare professionals can look at any number of images at computer terminals across NHS trusts” and “the digital image will follow the patient wherever they go”

In themselves, these statements are also a good thing. And the original requirement was to have all the Trusts’ PACS connected through N3 to help enable image sharing. But, in order to share images successfully, each PACS system (in each Trust) must know about all the examinations in all the other Trusts. Or have a central image sharing system (part of the original requirements) that does know and can redirect a query.

Last time I looked (a few minutes ago), there was no image sharing system in place, only Trust based archives which aren’t the same thing. Only the Trusts that have waded through the information governance minefield and created their own explicit connections with each other can share examinations.

Hence, unless there’s a lot of CD burning going on, there isn’t any “follow the patient” image sharing going on just yet.

So, no outright lie - but a neat sidestepping of the issue. To be fair, we don’t expect much else from politicians, do we?

In the end, it seems that by changing the original requirements to meet the delivered solution, there is a political ‘win’ and some face-saving all round. And the waste of money installing and decommissioning the big pink elephant, sorry, I meant to say “data centre”, for image sharing and central archiving just gets swept under the carpet...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sympathy vote.

Come on now. If you're a senior Civil Servant, you must get the odd pang of conscience now and again about bleeding the taxpayer white to fund your huge salary and fat, index linked pension while offering nothing in return bar platitudes, misdirection and lies.

Peeing 12.4bn quid up the wall to produce (alleged) "savings of 6.2m in the first year" is merely a defence mechanism designed to make these people feel that in the wasteful drain on taxpayer's resources stakes, they're only small beer.

Have a heart.

TeeCee

[Steve Oliver]

Copy/paste fallout

What does the Albert Fish and Game Association have to do with digital image storage?

[Anonymous Coward]

Small correction

Seems a bit picky to correct just this one thing when there are so many topics in the article that are contentious...

But: "Contracts for Pacs services were awarded in 2005 to Phillips, iSoft, GE, HSS and Afga by the national programme main suppliers. In the same year, Hillingdon became the first English hospital trust to go digital."

Hillingdon became the first hospital in the London Cluster to go live with the CfH PACS (BT/Philips).

Other UK hospitals, such as Charing Cross in London, have had PACS for more than ten years!

The article also makes out that this has happened in London, and the rest of the country are to follow. All the regions have been implimenting the CfH programme simultaneously, with greater or lesser success depending on the local conditions and the vendors who were awarded the contracts.