Carestream mid-way through NHSScotland PACS

Carestream Health has announced it has reached the half-way point in delivering PACS to NHSScotland, and intends to complete installations by the end of the year.

The project now has 21 sites connected out of the country’s 39 hospitals, with 10,000 general clinical users and 200 radiologists registered to the system.

According to 1 May statistics, the system currently stores over 1m images and is using 10 terabytes of capacity within the national archive.

Carestream’s UK & Ireland territory manager, Charlie McCaffrey, told E-Health Europe: “We have successfully reached the half-way mark on our NHSScotland PACS project and this coincides nicely with our first year trading independently as Carestream Health. In that time, we have forged a very good working relationship with the Scottish health boards, and have worked closely with programme boards to ensure implementations have gone successfully.

“We will continue to roll out the programme over the coming months and aim to complete installations by the end of 2008, with final acceptance formalized in the first quarter of 2009. We envisage the work to have been completed by the end of this financial year.”

NHSScotland initially signed a contract with Kodak to be the provider of PACS across the country before Kodak was purchased byOnex Corporation a year ago this month and was renamed Carestream Health.

For Carestream, reaching the half way stage in the seven months since being given the go-ahead to deploy is a significant step in rewarding NHSScotland’s confidence in the company following the initial sale of Kodak.

Carestream’s Europe North general manager, Graeme Allan, said: “The depth and breadth of the Scotland project demonstrates our core capabilities of innovative technology and project management.”

Once completed, every NHS board will be able to securely access images from a central national archive, which will hold up to 2 petabytes of data.

McCaffrey said that the successful implementations to date has led to more orders for other Carestream projects in Scotland.

"As a result of the success of initial deployments, we are already seeing demand for other niche products including Virtual Mammography Licensing for reporting digital mammography."

“We have also installed RIS systems in five NHS boards and have another two signed up, so we have a good presence here and are enabling Scotland to have good quality, accurate images using 21st Century systems. We are hoping other legacy sites will see the benefits too.”

Elsewhere in the UK, Carestream has been accepted into the ASCC catalogue for radiology and digital imaging systems.

McCaffrey said: “We’re not exactly clear how it will work, but as I understand it, NHS trusts will be able to approach us for business and we would hope to make available the products we are providing for NHSScotland and other European products which could integrate with existing NPfIT solutions.”

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