GE looks to ‘new’ NHS PACS market

GE Healthcare launched a number of new products at this year’s UKRC for the NHS picture archiving and communications system and radiology information system market.

The company, which currently provides PACS to 72 NHS trusts in England, has developed a web-based PACS and RIS system, a mobile application, a vendor neutral archive, a clinical patient information viewer and the eRadCockpit.

The 72 trusts were provided with their PACS under the National Programme for IT in the NHS, which awarded the local service provider contract for the South, North West and West Midlands to CSC, which sub-contracted GE Healthcare to supply the systems.

Olivier Croly, general manager of GE Healthcare in UK and Ireland, told eHealth Insider that the delivery of PACS as part of NPfIT had prevented the delivery of innovation to trusts.

“This is now our biggest challenge; the fact we were a sub-contractor and that we didn’t have a direct voice to our customers,” he said.

“This is a brand new market and we are launching this full suite of new products to show the innovation that is available, which has surprised people.

“We can do big things, but we can also do the small things too. It is important that we can do a giant deployment like we did but it’s also important that we can do a tailor-made deployment for trusts.”

The company, which employs 100 people in the UK for its system deployments, believes that its web-based PACS, which is integrated with GE’s Centricity RIS, allows for greater workflow sharing and reporting across different hospitals.

The mobile application provides access to the GE Centricity RIS on Apple’s iPad and includes collaboration features that allow two radiologists to “look at the images together from two different iPads by interfacing with GE’s vendor neutral archive.”

The clinical patient information viewer provides access and viewing of patient histories to multi-disciplinary teams throughout the patient’s health community and the eRadCockpit acts as a “layer of workflow that enables the community to share worklists across hospitals.”

The majority of the products have been implemented in other countries with the company’s VNA in Sweden currently interfacing with seven different PACS systems.

Croly said the products have been built on industry standards such as XDS, IHE, HL7 and DICOM and that they have been designed to allow trusts to “leverage the current infrastructure they have invested on in the last seven years.”

The vice chairman and general manager of GE’s specialty solutions business, Mike Jackman, told EHI that the company was focusing on the UK market as the company wanted to show trusts that it is “innovating and investing.”

“Our concept is to bring work to people rather than bringing them to where the work is and underpinning all that is a really big focus on data consolidation across the whole community of healthcare.

“There is a huge commitment to this space and with the backing GE has and strength we have in the modalities is powerful. We are here to stay and we are ready to play with a lot of energy and investment,” he said.

Digital imaging is the subject of the latest EHI special report.