Birmingham Children’s signs Agfa deal

Birmingham Children’s Hospital NHS Foundation Trust has signed a £3.5m deal with Agfa Healthcare for a picture archiving and communication system and radiology information system.

The trust went out to tender in summer of 2009 for a managed service PACS that would manage, book, report and retrieve images suitable for radiology and cardiology.

The tender also asked for a system that could manage the flow of patient data from request of image to publication of report.

The trust has never been part of PACS component of the National Programme for IT in the NHS.

It was live with its previous PACS before the local service provider contracts were negotiated.

It received six bids for the latest contract before awarding the seven year contract to Agfa Healthcare.

Gill Baker, head of EPR Strategy and ICT projects, told eHealth Insider: "The current PACS and RIS systems contracts were due for renewal which is why the trust went out to tender.

“The new contract will provide a single supplier for both the Information Management System and the PACS solution and this will ensure a seamless interface between the two solutions.

“It will also support both cardiology and radiology functions with the potential to expand into other specialties thereby creating a single patient folder containing all images.”

The trust will begin rolling out the systems over the next six to eight months.