Carestream Awarded PACS and VNA Contract in Birmingham

HEMEL HEMPSTEAD, January 7 — Carestream Health UK has been awarded a contract to supply University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust with a package of medical imaging solutions that will support co-ordinated, collaborative care across the Trust’s hospital sites. The procured CARESTREAM solutions will provide workflow management, clinical repository, diagnostic and image distribution functions as well as analytics applications to simplify medical image management and empower effective integration of services across sites for enhanced patient care.

The merger by acquisition of Heart of England NHS Foundation Trust by University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust in April 2018 created one of the largest teaching hospital trusts in England. The Trust includes the Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham in Edgbaston, Heartlands Hospital, Solihull Hospital and Community Services, Good Hope Hospital in Sutton Coldfield and Birmingham Chest Clinic. With 2,700 beds across the four main hospitals, the Trust’s teams treat more than 2.2 million people each year and perform more than 1.1 million radiology examinations.

The Trust’s new contract with Carestream will include access to the CARESTREAM Clinical Collaboration Platform  (VNA), the company’s enterprise imaging platform, built around a Unified Core and designed to simplify the consolidation, management and sharing of images enterprise-wide. Alongside this the Trust has also procured Carestream’s Vue PACS solution that includes Vue Reporting; its new Workflow Orchestrator tool, which directs imaging exams to appropriate clinical subspecialists before other available radiologists as needed, to satisfy desired turnaround times; the Vue Beyond business intelligence and reporting dashboard; and Carestream’s web-based, zero-footprint Vue Explorer portal, which provides a consolidated patient portfolio view from multiple data sources.

“This exciting contract will give Carestream and the Trust the chance to work together to simplify image management and unify the imaging environment across the Trust’s sites, specialties and technologies,” said Charlie McCaffrey, Managing Director at Carestream Health UK. “It will give everyone involved — from patients to clinicians — unfettered access to the diagnostic imaging information they need to collaborate effectively, helping to improve productivity, cost effectiveness and patient care.”

“The single Carestream PACS solution being used at all the UHB sites across Birmingham will allow us to improve the imaging services we provide to our patients. The advanced image review and analysis tools for our clinicians and radiologists will help us interpret our diagnostic data more quickly. The robust dual datacentre architecture should avoid clinical downtime and with our fully integrated Business Intelligence we will always know what is going on. I am very excited,” said Barnaby Waters, Imaging Technical Lead for the Trust.

Photo L-R: Ranjit Nandra, Carestream Key Account Manager; Charlie McCaffrey, Managing Director, Carestream; Kevin Bolger, Executive Director of Strategic Operations, UHB; and Barnaby Waters, Imaging Technical Lead, UHB.