40 business cases for PACS signed off

Forty business cases for picture archiving and communication systems (PACS) in the NHS in England have been signed off and completed and a new toolkit is to be made available shortly to support trusts in the implementation of the new systems.

David Jennings, NHS Connecting for Health’s national PACS implementation manager, announced the figures at a conference in Birmingham this week, adding: “We have quite a pipeline there moving forward.”

He recognised, however that the South of England and London were the regions where significant progress had been made to date with five go-lives. A sixth at James Paget Hospital in Norfolk, part of the Eastern cluster, went live recently with a system supplied as an additional service by the South’s local service provider, Fujitsi Alliance with GE Systems as its PACS sub-contractor.

Asked why the differential progress had happened, Jennings explained that contracts for the North East and Eastern region of England had only recently been closed. He said the solution for the North West and West Midlands region was not as mature as the others. “We are working to make sure it practically meets the requirements out there. The indications are that we will still be able to deploy on target.”

Overall, he told the Autumn Forum, organised by the British Journal of Healthcare Computing and Information Management: “I am very confident, looking at the deployment plans, that we will meet the objective of deploying PACS by March 31, 2007.”

He said the new toolkit was designed to support trusts over the lifecycle of implementation. He emphasised the importance of involving the whole NHS in sharing lessons learned. “It constantly amazes that people don’t communicate across boundaries,” he added.

Jennings said he felt engagement with clincians had been successful and they understood the benefits. A point had possibly been missed in involving executives, such as finance directors, more closely, but again he emphasised support was available down to trust level to go through the financial planning needed.

A poll among the audience which included suppliers and NHS staff revealed that 37% were very confident or confident that their LSP would meet local PACS requirements, 38% had a ‘so-so’ attitude to the question and 19% were not very confident on the issue.