Kettering accelerates access to images

Kettering General Hospital has deployed WAN optimisation technology to transfer radiology files of up to 500Mb to a clinic 12 miles – and five LAN network hops – from its main campus.

The trust says this has reduced image loading times by 80%, delivering significant cost savings, clinical benefits and leveraging the existing PACS and other infrastructure.

The deployment involved a pair of Blue Coat ProxySG devices that optimise the performance of the 10MB link between Kettering General Hospital in Northamptonshire and Rushden Hospital, where consultants need to access images such as x-rays and MRI scan for off-site viewing and reporting.

The devices provide object caching, byte caching, compression and protocol optimisation options, dramatically improving the speed with which images can be sent and loaded. They can also prioritise mission-critical traffic and halt malicious traffic.

Previously image-loading time was over a minute. Phil Taylor, senior operations analyst for the Kettering General Hospital NHS Trust, said: “The transfer time was too long for each image and often would time-out before the full image had loaded.”

The trust had been printing images and delivering them to regional clinics at the cost of around £200 per clinic.

The WAN optimisation reduced loading time to five to ten seconds, making PACS usable. It was considerably cheaper than the £30,000 annual cost of upgrading the bandwidth to Rushden to 100MB – although the trust declined to say by how much.

Taylor said staff were “bowled over” by the speed of image transfer. He added: “The alternatives available to us just weren’t workable. With Blue Coat we have a highly effective solution, with a predictable cost which delivers the functionality we needed.

“As well as cost and administrative time savings, ultimately, PACS is designed to improve the speed with which patients can be treated and we’re confident that these benefits can now be fully realised.”

The trust is now considering using ProxySG devices at additional sites and to make use to make use of the web security functionality it offers to protect the trust network from viruses and malware.

Nigel Hawthorn, European marketing vice president for Blue Coat, said more and more trusts and primary care trusts are now deploying web optimisation technology, which has been around for two years.

He said: “The NHS has taken some time to really work out the benefits of this technology but it is beginning to happen. “This is a first instance I know of in Europe where a trust has come out publicly to say they installed WAN optimisation technology for this specific application and it has delivered exactly what they needed.”

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