Following our press announcement we’re pleased to be able to talk openly about the work we are doing at Gateshead Health NHS Foundation Trust (QE Gateshead). As it embarks upon its long-term strategy towards the vision of a holistic digital patient record, BridgeHead has been assisting QE Gateshead through the implementation of a central repository (also known in the clinical imaging world as a vendor neutral archive or VNA) for all of its data. The short-term tactical requirement is to localise QE Gateshead’s DICOM images as it withdraws from the National PACS Programme (NPfIT).
Helping QE Gateshead Exit the NPfIT
After serving notice on its existing contract, ending in June 2014, QE Gateshead had a limited time to bring its centrally stored image data back under the Trust’s full control. Using traditional localisation methods of standard DICOM Query/Retrieve across N3, the Trust was initially working to an estimated 10-month timeframe to bring all of the data back from the LSP Central Data Store (CDS). The great news is that BridgeHead has helped the Trust to massively reduce these timescales. By utilising the tape store from QE Gateshead’s HSM system (put in place as part of the originally specified PACS environment), we have been able to access a copy of all of the Trust’s PACS data (that had also been archived to the CDS). As a result, the transfer time of these imaging studies, into the BridgeHead VNA, is estimated at a massively reduced 12 weeks. And, we’re happy to say that this data localisation work is almost complete.
QE Gateshead Takes Control of its Data
BridgeHead has always prided itself on being vendor agnostic, which means that our customers are not being tied to any one medium, platform or supplier. QE Gateshead found this extremely important as one of their key concerns was to get full control of their image data environment and avoid vendor lock-in. Beyond the Trust’s immediate challenges of PACS replacement and data migration, QE Gateshead saw that the BridgeHead VNA can be extended to a unified Healthcare Data Management (HDM) Solution for all of the hospital’s data and, thereby, effectively stores and protects both clinical and administrative information across the organisation (not just radiology images). It’s fantastic to see a hospital implementing a long-term strategic vision for data management. BridgeHead believes that this is an essential step for all hospitals to consider taking, as healthy patient care requires healthy patient data. As a result, we think there are a lot of Trusts that could take a leaf out of QE Gateshead’s book.
Read the full QE Gateshead press release and watch our 
video case study.
