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Overall

As we roll into Autumn, the Health and Social Care Information Centre’s PACS team is celebrating the success of all London trusts exiting and the closure of the London programme. We are now concentrating on the final ten months until trusts in the North East, Yorkshire and Humber and East of England and East Midlands (NEEEM) exit.

Due to the closure of the London programme this will be the last PACS bulletin. The team are committed to supporting all the remaining trusts and if you need to make contact, all communication channels are still open including pacs.query@hscic.gov.uk

Milestone achievement as London PACS programme closes

All the hospital trusts in London have now successfully transitioned to local arrangements for their PACS and RIS contracts, marking the closure of the London PACS programme.

Under the London Programme, 21 trusts signed up to take the PACS Services from BT and eight of those chose to take the RIS service as well. A further eight ‘legacy’ trusts signed up to connect to the central storage facility known as the MIA (Medical image Archive).

This was the largest data migration in the world to take place across a network – 1.3 petabytes stored into two data centres, or the equivalent of 2.4 billion images.

Personal Note from the Senior Responsible Owner (SRO) and Deputy SRO of the PACS Programme

For the last 10 years, we have been actively involved in helping trusts get the most from the National PACS Programme and helping the programme live up to the expectations promised at the start.

There have been some trials and challenges along the way, but we hope you agree that the programme introduced ground-breaking changes and benefits that have transformed the way the NHS works for the better and has provided real benefits for patients and clinicians.

It has been our privilege to work with you over the last 10 years and we wish you all the best of luck with your new systems.

Prof Erika Denton                                                      Tony Newman-Sanders FRCR, FRCP
SRO HSCIC National PACS Programme                   Clinical Lead and Deputy SRO

NEEEM progress

The shift to local control for trusts throughout NEEEM has continued throughout the summer. Two-thirds of trusts who made use of the central data store during the contract have now localised their data and are making final clinical checks on it. In the coming months we will be working to complete safe data transfers and exits for the remaining 9 trusts. The programme is on track to exit the contract as planned in June 2016.

The PACS programme has been considering the future options for those regions who have completed exit, we have and will continue to facilitate the capturing of lessons learned. These are available via the website.

The team is also working with NHS England, the supplier community and NHS trusts to explore possible open source PACS and Vendor Neutral Archives (VNA) solutions.

Keep in touch

Safe and timely exits depend on co-operation between different parties – please keep in touch with us and the regional exit boards. Help us to help you.

Up-coming regional exit boards:

• East of England and East Midlands: 2nd September
• NE, Yorkshire & Humber: 9th September
• National Board Meeting London: 17th September