North Bristol looks for PACS/RIS

North Bristol NHS Trust is looking to procure a picture archiving and communications system and a radiology information system, according to a tender notice issued by the Bristol and Weston NHS Purchasing Consortium.

The notice in the Official Journal of the European Union says the consortium is acting on behalf of its members, including the three big acute trusts in the region; University Hospitals Bristol NHS Foundation Trust, Weston Area Health NHS Trust, and North Bristol.

However, although the contract notice says further trusts from across the South West may join in at the pre-qualification questionnaire stage, it only discusses North Bristol’s requirements.

The trust became one of the three ‘greenfield’ trusts in the South of England to deploy Cerner Millennium at the end of last year.

The contract notice says its long-term plan is to use this electronic patient record as an “information base” to support the delivery of healthcare, and that radiology, images and reports will form a significant part of the record.

As a result, it says that while the RIS will hold a record of all the radiological examinations carried out across the trust, it must be able to integrate with other clinical systems, including the new EPR.

The EHI Intelligence NHS Trust Database shows the trust is currently using a GE Healthcare system. The contract notice says this “has proved to be a success with regards to the requirement to share images across the enterprise, and with many users who require access.”

It says any new system should come with single sign-on for all users, desktop integration, context synchronisation and the automatic display of relevant prior images, as well as working on both PCs and Apple computers.

The notice goes on to detail three other lots; voice recognition, which can be packaged as part of the RIS or provided separately, advanced image processing, which can also be presented as part of the PACS or separately, and a vendor neutral archive.

The notice says the trust has limited access to advanced imaging processing using full data sets, and sees extending this across as a “major priority”.

It indicates that the trust wants a vendor neutral archive to secure ownership of its clinical data, to further improve image sharing, and to make it easier to add or replace PACS in the future.

It is the consortium’s intention to identify a list of between four and eight qualified suppliers for each lot during the pre-qualification questionnaire stage.

A contract will be awarded for an initial period of five years, although there is scope to extend the deal for two additional periods of 12 months by mutual agreement.

The trust and the consortium were unavailable for comment, including any clarifcation on the trusts included in the tender.