UCLH RIS gets emergency upgrade

University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has carried out an emergency upgrade of its aging radiology information system to resolve a backlog in imaging caused by system issues.

The trust’s problems with the trust’s legacy CSC RadCentre RIS include a number of problems causing “down time” for the system and leading to a backlog of work.

The board papers for the trust’s September board meeting say that the system is reaching “end of life”.

“[UCLH medical director] Geoff Bellingan said the system was at the end of its life and there had been a number of problems that had caused down time, which had impacted on the time taken to report on plain film.

“However, the infrastructure platform was being upgraded and this had dramatically reduced the waiting time. We were monitoring the situation closely.”

A trust spokesperson told EHI its “dated” version of the RIS has been unable to deal with a steadily rising demand in imaging at busier times.

“Although a planned renewal of the RIS was already underway, our ICT team identified the cause of the poor performance and carried out an emergency upgrade of the system, which is now fully operational and stable.

“This, coupled with the excellent professional attitude of radiologists and radiology departments across UCLH, meant that the impact on services was minimal and we were able to safeguard reporting services in specialty services by working in cooperation with our joint venture partner Radiology Reporting Online.”

The spokesperson said the trust is currently tendering for a replacement RIS, with a new system expected to be in place by the end of 2015.

A CSC spokesperson said the company worked closely with the trust to support an upgrade to a new version of its underlying Oracle database.

“This work is now successfully complete."

The Health and Social Care Information Centre had earlier suggested  that London trusts are exiting their national digital imaging contracts on schedule.

The capital is the last area of the country to exit the PACS and RIS contracts that were placed by the National PACS Programme in 2004.

The London picture archiving and communication systems contract officially came to an end in June this year, but the programme negotiated a thirteen month transition period with BT that will end in July 2015.

All trusts in London must have moved their PACS data out of the BT central store, known as MIA, by this point.