RNOH takes McKesson PACS

The Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital Trust has signed a seven-year contract with McKesson for a picture archiving and communication system and radiology information system.

The trust was previously using a Sectra PACS and iSoft RIS, procured under the National Programme for IT.

The systems were supplied by BT, the local service provider for the London trusts, under a contract due to run out in June 2015.

McKesson will act as prime contractor, supplying its own PACS and an HSS RIS to the trust.

Implementation is expected to be completed in May, and work on migrating the images from BT’s MIA data store is already underway.

The procurement process, which began in July last year, was carried out using the NHS Supply Chain.

Dr Samir Butt, the trust’s clinical director for imaging, said stakeholders from all the different parts of the hospital, including IT, the PACS team, radiographers, radiologists and clinical end users, were involved in selecting the new supplier.

The solution will be used at both of the trust’s sites, in Stanmore and central London.

Dr Butt said that one of the main attractions of the McKesson solution is its StudyShare teaching archive.

“We hope that our teaching archive will be much better organised trust-wide and will give us access to the vast number of teaching activities and research projects that we have to do.”

Teaching was a particularly important part of the trust’s work, he said.

“We are unique in the sense that 20% of orthopaedic trainees in England get a training rotation with us. We get a significant number of radiology fellows through our ranks, and faculty members are heavily involved in teaching and creating courses throughout the country and internationally, so it is extremely important for us to have a user-friendly and comprehensive teaching archive.”

Dr Butt said that another attractive feature of the solution was that it incorporated McKesson QICS, a workflow engine that will improve both management of the trust’s multidisciplinary team meetings and operational management reporting.

The trust is the largest orthopaedic hospital in the UK and has a worldwide reputation. It employs 1,400 staff, has 220 inpatient beds and sees approximately 112,000 outpatients a year.

Earlier this month, the trust said it had signed a contract with TPP for its e-prescribing and e-discharge systems, with plans to roll it out by the end of the year.

The trust's director of IM&T, Saroj Patel, told EHI the deal with TPP is part of its “best of breed” approach to IT based around a clinical portal.