City workers view images from EPR

City Hospitals Sunderland NHS Foundation Trust staff will be able to see imaging data from within their electronic patient record using Agfa HealthCare’s enterprise imaging platform.

The Sunderland implementation will be the first for the platform in the UK and will support the capture, storage, exchange and access to medical images automatically through the trust’s Meditech EPR.

Starting with cardiology image data, 11 further ‘imaging rich’ departments will be added to the platform over three years including opthamology, urology and endoscopy.

The agreement will also see the upgrade of Sunderland’s picture archiving and communication system.

The trust first deployed Agfa HealthCare’s PACS solution in 2007, as part of the National PACS Programme that formed part of the National Programme for IT.

Trusts across the UK have been moving off their national contracts, and City Hospitals Sunderland has just signed a new, seven year deal with Agfa that includes the move to the upgraded platform.

Andy Hart, director of IT and information governance at the trust, said: “Having worked with Agfa’s solutions for many years, we are confident in working closer together.

“We know they share with us a common vision and goal: visually enabling our hospitals in order to deliver improved patient care.”

City Hospitals Sunderland has also worked with Meditech for the best part of two decades. It was the first to use the company’s e-prescribing system in the UK, and it has extended the system in various ways, for example by installing a vendor neutral archive from BridgeHead to collect data and then release it to devices at the pont of care.

Grant Witheridge, general manager of Agfa HealthCare UK said: “We aim to provide a platform that meets and exceeds [the trust’s] business and clinical needs [and] to visually enable the trust’s EPR with all types of imaging data, eliminating information bottlenecks and silos”.