Healthcare IT company Carestream Health U.K. has been awarded a contract to supply University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust with a package of medical imaging solutions that will aim to support coordinated, 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,” according to officials.
The University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust provides adult district general hospital services for South Birmingham as well as specialist treatments for the West Midlands. The merger of Heart of England NHS Foundation Trust and University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust last April created one of the largest teaching hospital trusts in England. 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 an array of products: Carestream Clinical Collaboration Platform (VNA, vendor neutral archive), the company’s enterprise imaging platform; Carestream’s Vue PACS (picture archiving and communication system) 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.
“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,” Barnaby Waters, imaging technical lead for the Trust, said in a statement. Added Charlie McCaffrey, managing director at Carestream Health U.K. Limited, “It will give everyone involved—from patients and administrators—unfettered access to the diagnostic imaging information they need to collaborate effectively, helping to improve productivity, cost effectiveness and patient care.”
