Agfa HealthCare’s Enterprise Imaging for Radiology suite has gone live at the Princess Alexandra Hospital in Harlow, Essex.
The new, unified platform, offering intuitive use, embedded clinical tools, reporting functionality, and a powerful workflow engine, is already providing the hospital with key benefits that support its efficiency and patient care goals.
Princess Alexandra Hospital is one of three hospitals run by the Princess Alexandra Hospital NHS Trust, which serves a population of around 350,000.
XERO is proving to be a powerful tool for our clinicians and we are confident in our plans to extend the platform to other departments in the coming year
When its original contract with Agfa HealthCare ended in 2017, the hospital carried out a competitive tender to upgrade its image management. Enterprise Imaging for Radiology was chosen as the best solution to meet the trust’s needs.
The contract includes:
- Enterprise Imaging for Radiology, sized to handle a volume of around 260,000 imaging studies per year, with an annual growth rate of 10%
- A scalable vendor-neutral archive (VNA), which can be adapted at the hospital’s own pace to include images from other departments
- Reporting and advanced clinical applications such as MIP/MPR and Volume Viewing embedded on the radiologist’s desktop, as well as TeraRecon advanced image post-processing capabilities
- The web-based XERO Enterprise Viewer, which provides secure access to reports and images, outside the conventional boundaries of the healthcare enterprise. The XERO Xtend feature set adds full fidelity view functionality to the solution
- Business Intelligence (BI), which enables the hospital to access all information in the unified platform in order to create standard and custom reports for governance and for local decision-making on best working practices
- Faster reporting and flexible workflow
Since the platform has gone live, the Princess Alexandra Hospital has already experienced some key benefits. For the first time, the it has been able to use 100% voice recognition for reporting, without the need for audio typing and supporting faster report turnaround times.
Planning for the future, the solution also supports home working and reporting for the radiologists, who can access their full ‘tool set’, including voice recognition and advanced clinical applications, even over low bandwidth. This flexibility increases reporting capacity, efficiency and speed of diagnosis.
The XERO Enterprise Viewer aims to promote regional and local collaboration between clinicians, patients and other healthcare providers. As images load quickly, referrers benefit from faster reviewing, enabling timely treatment or onward referral of patients.
And, with the full fidelity of XERO Xtend, clinicians can review MPRs and 3D images from any location.
Under the hospital’s medical imaging strategy, the platform will be extended to additional image-producing departments over the next 12 months, including pathology, ophthalmology and operating room imaging. No additional VNA is needed with Enterprise Imaging, so the platform can be extended just by adding another modality.
“We’re very pleased with the go-live”, said Stephen Townrow, imaging systems manager at the Princess Alexandra Hospital NHS Trust.
We are now getting sub-one-second system response times for image retrieval, while our plain film reporting times have significantly decreased due to the speed and shortcuts
“An important part of the implementation was the specification of the correct infrastructure both for our current and future requirements. We are now getting sub-one-second system response times for image retrieval, while our plain film reporting times have significantly decreased due to the speed and shortcuts.
“XERO is proving to be a powerful tool for our clinicians as well, and we are confident in our plans to extend the platform to other departments in the coming year.”