RADIOLOGY & IMAGING
Moreover, as GDE and STP sites take up their mandate to explore innovative models of integrated care, the focus on service delivery across organisational boundaries is increasing. It’s no longer enough to know what’s going on inside your organisation, there’s a need to understand and connect with what’s happening outside of it. This is forcing senior management to develop an enterprise-wide view of their operations and patient populations, where the ‘enterprise’ stretches across entire local health economies.
Aboard the enterprise
So how can organisations remove historical obstacles that undermine radiology’s position as the gateway to critical care? The answer may well depend on making the move to an enterprise imaging solution. Enterprise imaging solutions are not only aligned with national directives to develop integrated services, but they can also help individual organisations address the many pressures on radiology.
Solving the staff shortage
At present, the most common approach to the chronic shortage of radiologists is to outsource services to a private provider, which is evident by the high costs spent by NHS hospitals in 2017. The cost implications of outsourcing alone are significant – but the approach also carries additional risks around quality of service. NHS organisations have little arbitration over the processes, capabilities and quality of private providers, nor the standards of clinical reporting being supplied. However, next generation enterprise imaging systems could offer a solution to the workforce problem.
Not only can they provide real-time access to images and reports to professionals across the health economy, irrespective of their clinical setting, they also enable a platform for collaborative working across sites. This means that organisations can
The development of an enterprise-wide imaging strategy could help transform NHS organisations as they battle to adapt to a changing healthcare environment.
optimise resources across multiple settings, providing speedy access to available radiologists and helping to balance workload. Such collaborative working can help maximise bandwidth. What’s more, it helps accelerate care whilst at the same time maintaining quality control. The most effective enterprise systems include workflow tools that support the management of resources across organisational boundaries, providing a safe and reliable foundation for collaborative working. Moreover, the collaborative approach offers benefits of scale including greater bargaining power across the local health economy.
Driving quality gains and patient satisfaction
Although the journey towards collaborative working may well be an incremental one, proactive organisations are already exploring the opportunity of creating regional enterprise imaging environments. However, for Trusts that aren’t yet ready to take this route, enterprise imaging solutions still provide significant benefits for clinicians and patients alike. The best offer interoperability with existing systems to empower clinicians across the enterprise with ready access to key patient data. This not only supports
clinical decision-making with up-to-date imaging and reports but it helps improve patient/clinician interaction and accelerate treatment. Real-time access to data can help remove unnecessary delays, reduce the administrative burden on the NHS and improve operational efficiency. Moreover, the associated gains free up clinicians to see more patients, further clearing the system. The impact on patient satisfaction and health outcomes can be profound. In health economies that have already embraced the enterprise concept, the results – like the images – are there for all to see. For example, in Ireland, the National Integrated Medical Imaging System (NIMIS) now connects 63 facilities across 40 hospitals, across the whole country using a single PACS and RIS solution. It has revolutionised healthcare delivery and means that, irrespective of where they touch the health service, patients and clinicians have instant access to all their diagnostic images.3 The approach can easily translate to the NHS. PACS and RIS systems are at the heart of radiology departments, where patient images and reports are stored and distributed electronically. Change Healthcare and the HSE began working together in 2010 to significantly re-engineer Ireland’s radiological imaging services through the delivery of the NIMIS programme.
The successful deployment of NIMIS would result in a filmless and paperless radiology service, enable secure, rapid movement of patient image data throughout the health service, and allow doctors to view their patients’ diagnostic images quickly and easily, anywhere, anytime; electronically. In diagnostic imaging a patient may require multiple examinations, from simple X-Rays to advanced CT and MRI scans, all must be interpreted, stored and shared across a number of healthcare services and professionals. Medical imaging technology is designed to operate optimally in a digital environment and has moved to a point
NOVEMBER 2018
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