A consortium of five South West trusts has chosen Accenture to provide a cloud-based radiology information system.
The five trusts – Plymouth Hospitals, Northern Devon Healthcare, South Devon Healthcare, Royal Cornwall Hospitals and Devon and Exeter – had both a picture archiving and communications system and a RIS supplied by local service provider CSC under a contract negotiated through NPfIT.
Under the contract, which was due to run out this month, CSC provided a cloud-based RIS from HSS. The trusts have now decided to continue with HSS as the RIS supplier, and to retain the cloud-based model.
But they have chosen Accenture as a third party provider. Accenture is hosting the RIS on Accenture Clinical Services, a platform that enables clinicians to share information over a secure infrastructure.
The contract will run for five years, with an option to extend for another five years. Andy Blofield, director of the Plymouth ICT Shared Service, and senior responsible officer for the consortium, said: “The cloud-based service worked very well.
“All that’s changed now is that CSC has been replaced by Accenture as a service provider and it looks like being a very good relationship.”
The full deployment took only ten weeks, and included the migration of data from the CSC systems to Accenture.
Although the migration had proved challenging, Accenture had resolved the issues very quickly, Blofield said.
The five trusts used the OJEU procurement process to find new systems. Earlier this year, they announced that they had chosen Basingstoke-based Insignia as their PACS supplier.
Originally, there were seven trusts in the consortium, but two, Taunton and Somerset and Yeovil District Hospital, pulled out and opted for Carestream to supply both the PACS and RIS systems.
Accenture predicts that more trusts will opt for cloud-based solutions in the future, to improve data sharing and reduce the impact on trust IT departments of maintaining complex systems.
Matt Oakley, who leads the company’s medical imaging practice in the UK and Ireland, said: “This cloud-based solution will enable clinicians across the region to share patient data, which can be crucial in urgent cases.
“It will also enable trusts to concentrate on providing the best care to patients, rather than having to worry about maintaining and IT system.”
Read more about the procurement in Insight: Examinging: changing PACS in the South West.