By Tony Tomkys, Vice President of UK and Ireland, BridgeHead Software
2016 is going to be a real time of change for a number of NHS Trusts across the North East, Yorkshire & Humber, East of England and East Midlands regions (NEEEM) as they exit their PACS and RIS contracts put in place by the National PACS Programme (part of NPfIT) in 2004. For the first time in over a decade, many NHS Trusts will have autonomy and, thereby, the power to innovate and take a more strategic approach to their patient data, whether medical images or broader healthcare data types.
This movement will be amplified by the emergence of shared ecosystems, where NHS organisations across certain geographic regions are working together to ensure they can collectively access each other’s patient data. This collaborative approach is exactly what we are seeing with Greater Manchester, East of England and Yorkshire Trusts – the latter establishing the Regional Imaging Collaborative for Yorkshire.
The idea is simple: medical images are made available across the member organisations to clinicians at the point of care. For some consortia, this extends beyond the requirements of radiology images to include the needs of other clinical disciplines, such as cardiology. But, this is not restricted to medical images, thereby presenting an amazing opportunity to create an environment whereby clinicians have all of the data they need at their fingertips, such as clinical reports, lab results, patient correspondence, admission notes or scanned documents are all eligible for sharing (and this is just scratching the surface). It is BridgeHead’s view – and one shared by many – that patient data is THE strategic asset, not the applications that create that data.
So, how can healthcare organisations facilitate such a collaborative ecosystem? One of the increasingly popular technologies being used by Trusts up and down the UK – namely North Middlesex University Hospitals, Homerton University Hospital, Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and others – is the Independent Clinical Archive (ICA), also referred to as a third generation Vendor Neutral Archive (VNA) or VNA 3.0. Essentially, it’s a software solution that separates the data from the application that created it and the hardware on which that data resides. By breaking these chains, and allowing patient data of all kinds to be centrally stored, protected and made available to those that need it, when they need it, across the region, member healthcare organisations can make significant in-roads in realising their vision for a single patient record.
How can an Independent Clinical Archive (a.k.a. VNA 3.0) help manage patient data?
For those Trusts running collaborative procurements, there are some key reasons why an ICA approach should be a key consideration for managing patient data:
Reduce the pain of application and storage migration
When replacing or refreshing existing systems like PACS, the challenge for Trusts is how to introduce these new technologies whilst protecting their services, minimising downtime and ensuring continuity of care. An ICA enables Trusts to separate patient data from the application that created it removing the dependency on that application. Data is moved to a place of independence, the ICA. And because much of the migrated data is transformed into an open healthcare data standard, the new application/s can then be pointed to the archive and normal operations resumed.
Enable all of your data to be commonly accessible
With a strong appetite to share patient data across the healthcare continuum, an ICA can manage all data objects, from DICOM images to JPEGs; scanned patient records to clinical reports. Once stored in the ICA, all imaging and associated data can be made available within the ecosystem, whether across departments in a hospital or across a region of healthcare providers. When a Trust’s data is centrally managed in this way, it only needs to integrate with one application (the ICA), rather than a whole host of disparate systems.
Avoid vendor lock-in
We often hear from Trusts that, once they have invested in a particular application, such as a PACS, they feel trapped for the life of the contract. With the ICA effectively separating patient data from the application that created it and the storage on which it resides, as well as adhering to open healthcare data standards (DICOM, HL7, XDS, etc.), it enables Trusts to make decisions on how that data is stored, protected and shared rather than being restricted by the source application or storage hardware.
Unite all imaging applications through common data management
By deploying an ICA and adopting healthcare data standards, Trusts can have complete autonomy over the applications they choose and, typically, disparate images (and other data types) will be commonly searchable and accessible by the Trusts across the region.
Retire legacy applications while your patient data lives on
Many Trusts are managing and maintaining legacy imaging or related clinical applications for governance and compliance reasons and as an insurance policy just in case they need access to that information – all the while paying licensing, support and maintenance costs (among other things). If NHS Trusts were to extract the patient data residing on those systems, transform it to open data standards and then store it in the ICA, that data becomes available as part of the patient record. At the same time, the Trust can benefit from significant cost savings associated with fully retiring those redundant applications.
Better manage patient data through the transition of care
It is really important that data (i.e. correspondence, medical images, clinical reports, etc.) flows with the patient to ensure the best level of care. An approach based around an ICA offers a central integration point for all such patient data, not just within the Trust, but across primary care facilities, mental health Trusts and community healthcare organisations.
And, we haven’t even touched on the advantages of data protection and efficient storage management that an ICA can provide. So, before NHS Trusts make any decisions regarding their sharing infrastructure, they should explore all of the benefits an ICA can offer.
If you would like further information, please contact either myself at: tony.tomkys@bridgeheadsoftware.com or john.mccann@bridgeheadsoftware.com and we’d be delighted to explore your options with you.
