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As of midnight on 01 July, the 78 trusts using the GE Centricity PACS provided by CSC under the national PACS contract have transitioned to their locally procured PACS and RIS systems. All in all, the transition went incredibly smoothly.The exit project involved the migration of some four petabytes of data from the CSC data centres to local trust storage: this is the equivalent of approximately one million DVDs of data!
This process, which has been described as "the biggest data migration in the world" successfully completely a few days before the end of the contract. I appreciate that this was done under immense time pressures resulting in some trusts receiving their complete data very late in the day; we also had no choice but to drip feed information about the data localisation on a monthly basis - this was simply because the details of the solution were still being finalised after we had started the work. The key lesson learnt from the exercise is a rather obvious one - start the process a year before you think you need to do so.
The PACS programme team extend their thanks to all trusts involved for their cooperation and patience over the last year. Good luck with your new systems!
Additionally, a further five trusts from Yorkshire and Teeside exited the contract with Accenture at the same time. This process was a lot more straightforward as Accenture continue to provide PACS services to the remaining 26 trusts so data migration can continue beyond the point of contract exit. Nonetheless, congratulations to the trusts involved for a successful contract transition.
This leaves us with 20 trusts within the BT contract and 26 with Accenture. We expect at least half of these to exit the contracts in a year with the remainder forming a tail form mid 2014 to as late as 2016. It goes without saying that the team's focus has immediately switched to these trusts - the regional teams are now bolstered by the resource that was previously working on the trusts exiting in wave one.
Finally, the team is spending the summer and beyond with a focus on capturing lessons learnt. Anyone who was involved in the first wave of exit will be contacted through a variety of channels and invited to contribute to this effort. I would enthusiastically encourage you to share the knowledge you have gained. The NHS has built up a wealth of experience over the last 12 months and it would be a shame if we were not to transfer this to our colleagues about to repeat the process.
Thanks!
Alasdair Thompson, PACS Programme Head
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