Homerton University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust
Problem Solved
In 2013, as the National Programme for IT (NPfIT) drew to an end, Homerton University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust had to repatriate 800K studies of DICOM images held in BT’s Medical Image Archive (MIA) before June 2015. Homerton wanted to implement a hospital-wide vendor neutral archive (VNA) to store, protect and share not only this legacy data, but any new images from their future incoming Carestream PACS, as well as data from other departments, including: cardiology and foetal medicine. Homerton implemented BridgeHead’s HealthStore to act as the central repository for all of its historic and new radiology images, as well as acting as a data management layer for its enterprise imaging strategy.
Since then, Homerton has embarked on an ambitious digital transformation journey across the hospital, including the digitisation of its Outpatients Department which, in itself, is set to save the Trust £1.75m. BridgeHead’s HealthStore® continues to act as the central repository for all historic paper-based records as well as the enterprise image VNA (for medical images such as radiology, cardiology, endoscopy, ophthalmology, medical photography, etc.), integrated with Homerton’s Cerner EPR. This provides clinicians running Outpatients clinics access to a rich patient record at the point of care delivery.
BridgeHead also continues to work with Homerton on the One London initiative and the regional cancer data sharing program.
Why BridgeHead?
- BridgeHead’s HealthStore® is a best-of-breed, policy-based, repository for all clinical and administrative data (structured or unstructured) across a hospital, helping to power the EPR
- HealthStore separates the data from the application that created it and the storage hardware on which it resides. This removes vendor lock-in and provides choice and flexibility over when and how new applications are brought online, such as PACS
- BridgeHead’s adherence to healthcare data standards, such as XDSi/XDSb, DICOM, IOCM, HL7. etc.
- HealthStore® Offers protection of all data in the event of loss, corruption, outage or disaster, ensuring availability to those that need it, when they need it, at the point of care
- Breadth of experience in migrating and managing healthcare data and BridgeHead’s excellent reputation for customer support
Hospital Profile
- Est. in 1932, very reputable, modern & well-equipped
- Among the first 10 NHS Trust to receive ‘Foundation Trust’ status
- One of the designated hospitals for the London Olympic 2012
- 4,000 staff, 450+ beds, over 75 sites; 12,000 A&E patients & 6,000 babies born (yearly)
- Now using BridgeHead’s HealthStore
Homerton NHS Digitally Transforms The Outpatients Department (2019)
BridgeHead’s VNA provided us with total PACS neutrality as, due to its vendor agnosticism, it is able to work with all PACS providers. This means we will have the flexibility to make an objective decision about what PACS solution is right for us as an organisation. We also had storage problems. A strategy of keeping everything on fast local hardware all of the time is not sustainable. We needed to be far more strategic and BridgeHead’s solution allowed us to take a more objective view of our data. Now, less critical data, i.e. images and reports from patients discharged more than six months ago for example, can be moved to less expensive storage, or even out to the cloud with integrity and availability still intact.”