Major milestone reached in NHSScotland PACS project as Carestream Health marks first year as an independent company

Published: 05/05

GENEVA, CH - (HealthTech Wire) -  As Carestream Health, Inc. marks its first anniversary of operations, the company has announced reaching the half way implementation stage of the NHSScotland National PACS Project, one of the world’s largest healthcare IT installations. 21 hospital sites (50% of installations) are now connected.

This Project is one of a number of achievements reached by Carestream Health during its inaugural year. Since its founding on May 1 2007, the company has launched more than 25 innovative digital imaging and IT products and services, won several global industry awards and initiated groundbreaking work across Europe and emerging markets, including the Baltic States, Italy, Finland and several Middle East countries.

“During our first year of operation Carestream Health has achieved significant progress,” said Graeme Allan, Europe North General Manager, Carestream Health. “We are selected to implement some of Europe’s most challenging projects because we offer not only IT and networking expertise, but also because of the insight we bring from our proven track record in digital imaging.”

Scotland – A True National Solution

The contract with NHS National Services Scotland involves the installation of CARESTREAM PACS and Information Management Solutions across Scotland’s 15 Health Boards, comprising 39 hospitals. Scotland is a true national solution that encompasses all types of hospitals ranging from city centre, district, rural and the highlands and islands.

Information sharing is a strong clinical theme within NHSScotland and the implementation of CARESTREAM PACS allows the cross-site exchange of data via a single clinical system. Authorised users in every hospital across the region can access prior images and reports regardless of where they were generated. All studies from all hospitals are stored in a national archive so no matter where a patient has an episode within Scotland, the treating clinician can query and retrieve their studies via the PACS.

Currently 10,000 general clinical users and 200 radiologists are registered to the system, which is currently storing over 1,000,000 images and using 10 Terabytes of capacity within the national archive. On completion of the project, projected managed storage will be 2 Petabytes.

“The depth and breadth of the Scotland project demonstrates our core capabilities of innovative technology and project management,” added Graeme Allan. “Since being awarded the national PACS contract, NHSScotland has further demonstrated their confidence in Carestream Health with the award of a separate contract to install our Radiology Information System (RIS) in several of Scotland’s Health Boards as part of a national procurement. Five Health Boards are currently installed and live with a further two due for installation by the middle of 2008.”

Looking Ahead

“As we move into our second year of business and beyond, we have all the right ingredients to help customers transition to digital imaging and, in doing so, we can drive the growth of our company. We are more focused than ever before on bringing new technologies to market and on delivering greater value to customers.” Graeme Allan concluded.