Gateshead Health NHS Foundation Trust

Problem Solved

The Trust needed to localise & ‘take control of’ approx. 15TB of compressed DICOM images before the end of their Local Service Provider (LSP) contract with Accenture in June 2014 (part of the National Programme for IT (NPfIT). QE Gateshead has put in place a 25TB vendor neutral archive (VNA) from BridgeHead to provide a central repository for this data, where it can be adequately protected and made available to their current and future PACS environment.

Why BridgeHead?

  • Offer a VNA to store current DICOM images from radiology PACS as well as other clinical and administrative data (facilitating part of Gateshead’s EPR strategy), now and in the future
  • Have reduced DICOM localisation times from 10 months to 12 weeks
  • Provide full protection for Gateshead’s VNA environment ensuring data availability to those that need it, when they need it
  • Solution is application & storage agnostic & so removes vendor lock-in (Gateshead decided on the VNA before their new PACS on the basis they could choose any application they wanted and it would work).

Hospital Profile

  • Among the first NHS Foundation Trusts, est. 2005
  • Innovation-oriented & received Quality & Excellence Award
  • 6 sites, 3,000 employees, serving a 7m population
  • Annual budget £184 million
  • Legacy QStar tape backups
  • Legacy PACS – AGFA (moving to Carestream)
  • LSP Provider – Accenture
  • Now using BridgeHead’s DICOM & Windows File Archive
“With the end of our current LSP contract looming, we have been tasked with removing all of our PACS data from the CDS and onto another storage platform to support on-going patient care. We knew BridgeHead could assist us with our immediate imaging data needs in a cost effective way. However, BridgeHead was also able to help and guide us to take a long-term, strategic view – ensuring we store and manage other healthcare data in the future as we transition to a fully electronic patient record.”
Clare Jones

Radiology IT Systems Manager, Gateshead Health NHS Foundation Trust

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