ASHTEAD, UK, JUNE 13th 2012 – BridgeHead Software has announced the successful implementation of its Healthcare Data Management solution at City Hospitals Sunderland NHS Foundation Trust, as well as announcing its joint effort with Dell to provide a comprehensive Vendor Neutral Archive to the hospital.
The Trust first engaged with BridgeHead for the scanning and archiving and integrated backup and disaster recovery solutions to support its MEDITECH healthcare information system. After working with the Trust, and proving its capability in data and storage management, BridgeHead engaged with Dell, another of Sunderland’s trusted partners, as part of a pan-European pilot to prove interoperability of BridgeHead’s Vendor Neutral Archive (VNA) solution on Dell’s DX6000 platform.
The role of the pilot is to bring together patient data from different imaging technologies into a single, unified repository. BridgeHead provides the holistic VNA that manages both administrative and clinical information generated by the Trust, which is underpinned by Dell’s DX storage platform. Once contained within the archive, the Trust’s data can then be made available to any device at the point of patient care. An analysis of the solution concluded that it increased the amount of time clinicians spent with patients, and reduced the time the Trust’s ophthalmic department spent dealing with hard copy images.
One of Dell’s preferred partners in Europe, BridgeHead is active on several pilots with Dell at a number of European hospitals, and was with Dell at this year’s European Congress of Radiology in Vienna.
BridgeHead Software is the only Dell partner that manages both clinical and administrative data. The holistic interoperability BridgeHead makes possible is unique, as most other providers of Vendor Neutral Archiving offer solutions that manage only part of a hospital’s data – image data from Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS) only, for example. By contrast, BridgeHead streamlines, protects and simplifies all of a Trust’s data, from X-rays right through to emails.
“Our journey with BridgeHead started with the requirement to secure and protect the data from our Healthcare Information System. BridgeHead not only demonstrated their competency and expertise in this regard, but opened our eyes to some of their other capabilities. This led to our embarking on the pilot programme with both BridgeHead and Dell for a vendor neutral archive – initially focusing on archiving our Ophthalmic Imaging System,” said Andy Hart, Director of IT & IG at City Hospitals Sunderland NHS Foundation Trust.
Andy continued, “At City Hospitals Sunderland, our focus is on ensuring patient safety and quality of care. To underpin this, it is vital that the information we have on our patients is stored, secured, correlated and made accessible for our clinicians. Working with BridgeHead and Dell in deploying their complementary solutions has allowed our staff to spend more time with patients and on patient care. This is a clear example of how IT can truly support the day-to-day running of a hospital.”
Jim Beagle, CEO of BridgeHead Software, said BridgeHead was delighted to be part of Dell’s UCA solution.
He said, “We’ve been working with City Hospitals Sunderland NHS Foundation Trust for some time now in relation to protecting their patient data and have forged a strong strategic relationship with their IT department. It’s great to see a hospital with a dynamic, forward thinking approach to resolving their data management challenges.”
Jim continued, “As for the pilot of Sunderland’s Vendor Neutral Archive, working with Dell in both a strategic and technological capacity has been excellent. With the breadth of Dell’s hardware and services in conjunction with BridgeHead’s data and storage management capabilities, the joint offering has already proved hugely successful. In fact, some of the participating hospitals piloting the solution, having recognised the value it brings to their organisations, have broadened the remit of the programme into managing data from other departments – which is a great endorsement. BridgeHead looks forward to continuing our relationship with Dell.”
As BridgeHead’s second-annual Healthcare Data Management survey confirmed in February, most UK hospitals want more control over the storage and management of their medical image data, seen as the top cause of healthcare data growth. BridgeHead and Dell’s joint offering is well positioned to meet the NHS’s future data and storage management needs in this regard.
