Fujitsu hits 100m PACS images

Fujitsu Services, the NHS’s IT prime contractor for the South of England, has today recorded the 100 millionth patient image stored in its data centre as part of the Connecting for Health, picture archiving and communications systems (PACS) programme.

Two million images a week are being added to Fujitsu’s PACS data centre, with the programme nationally now said to have reached the half-way mark. 

The 100 millionth image was stored by Weston Area Health NHS Trust. Fujitsu’s PACS data centre in the South of England was the first to be established within the Connecting for Health (CfH) programme and first began storing images and reports in April 2005.

Fujitsu has deployed PACS and RIS (Radiology Information System) in over 152 locations covering 37 NHS trusts. Fujitsu is installing PACS in conjunction with GE Healthcare, a division of the General Electric Company and Healthcare Software Systems (HSS).

The Fujitsu/GE implementations include three ‘out of cluster’ sites: James Paget Healthcare NHS Trust, Great Yarmouth, Royal Liverpool & Broadgreen University Hospital NHS Trust, University Hospitals Coventry & Warwickshire NHS Trust.

Peter Hutchinson, managing director UK public sector, Fujitsu Services said: “100 million patient images stored is a real milestone and it illustrates the scale of deployment achieved by the new technology.

"The new system is good news for patients and clinical staff alike as it improves workflow efficiency in hospitals and delivers tangible savings for the NHS as well. This is a clear demonstration of a Government IT programme being delivered on time and to budget.”

Hutchinson told EHI the 100 millionth digital x-ray was in a group of images for Weston, but given they didn’t look at the images they’d not know who the patient was.

Asked about when the system will be fully rolled out in the South he said: "Our contract says we will be fully deployed by march 2007.  We’ve got two trust’s left where we’ve got a bit of work left to do hit that target."

As PACS is rolled out to hospitals across the country, medical images and reports are stored on PACS at the individual trust site and archived for future retrieval in the data centre. This facility allows radiologists to access images either via the PACS workstation for diagnostic reporting or via web browsers for general viewing by other clinicians.

Hutchinson said: “83% of all PACS systems are now live in NHS Trusts in the South of England which are part of the National Programme and all are now using PACS deployed by Fujitsu. Work is already underway at the remaining trusts which will go live in the coming months.”

He told EHI that in addition to PACS Fujitsu, with its partner GE, has also implemented Radiology Information Systems (RIS), integrated with each PACS installation.

Benefits of PACS were already being seen across the South said Hutchinson.  While x-ray films were typically unavailable or lost 20% of the time digital images were instantly available and could be accessed remotely. "One trust we’re working with has brought down the time to report on a chest x-ray down from a week to 1.5 days."

CfH says that it has now reached the halfway mark on the PACS programme, having installed PACS at 65 sites over the past 20 months. Over half of these sites are in the South of England. The DH target is for PACS to be fully installed across England by December 2007.

Laurence Sutton, consultant radiologist and national clinical lead for PACS and data migration and retention at CfH, said: "Storing over 100 million patient images demonstrates our continued success in delivering PACS to the NHS and the benefits trusts are realising by using PACS and going filmless."

He added that 100m standard x-ray film images needing to be stored physically "would cover an area roughly the size of 1,250 football pitches."

Sutton concluded: "Although this is a large number of images, this figure is also just a small proportion of what we can achieve with the national PACS programme; the next steps are to enable sharing of these images between other health care organisations across England."

CfH’s PACS programme head, Mary Barber, said: "We have patient stories that show they are experiencing shorter waiting times in A&E and fewer delays in receiving their results. Trusts are also starting to see improvements in workflow efficiency and cost savings from the end of wet film processing."

According to CfH to date the following PACS implementations have occured:

• London 13 ‘entities’ (62% of total)
• South 30 ‘entities’ (86% of total)
• Eastern 8 ‘entities’ (47% of total)
• NWWM 8 entities (19% of total)
• North East 6 (43% of total)

CfH says the implementations above are in addition to the 43 NHS trusts that already had PACS installed before the NPfIT programme.