As part of a new 5 year deal, Gateshead Health NHS Foundation Trust is extending its use of BridgeHead Software’s Independent Clinical Archive (ICA), HealthStore®, to consolidate, store, protect and share all of its clinical images, including cardiology studies and medical photography. This, in turn, will eliminate clinical data silos and streamline the management of medical imagery across the Trust.
Already a longstanding customer, Gateshead Health have been using HealthStore for the last six years as a central repository for all of its radiology studies, ensuring they are accessible to its radiologists through the current PACS supplied by Carestream.
To support the roll out of its digital roadmap, and as part of its Global Digital Exemplar (GDE) programme, Gateshead Health has recently signed a new deal with BridgeHead to extend its use of HealthStore to provide a long-term, strategic clinical repository to cover multiple clinical applications. The new licence caters for Gateshead Health’s enterprise imaging strategy to enhance patient care and optimise hospital operations. Initially, BridgeHead will migrate the existing cardiology data from Philips Xcelera into HealthStore, but will then focus on helping the Trust realise its goal of utilising the ICA as a central imaging repository across clinical departments and specialties.
Nicole Conroy, Clinical Systems Manager at Gateshead Health NHS Foundation Trust explains, “We’re currently part of the GDE programme and working hard towards becoming a HIMSS level 7 run Trust. With this in mind, we’re keen for departments, such as cardiology, to store data electronically and adopt electronic workflows. This not only allows us to share data in a secure format, whether that be with a patient or another Trust, but also means that patient data is accessible and available, at the point of care, to those with the authority to view it.”
As part of Gateshead Health’s overarching data strategy, the Trust plans to consolidate, ingest and index all clinical images into HealthStore – effectively creating a single, centralised, clinical repository for all medical images. Once in HealthStore, the Trust will image-enable its Medway EPR, by providing direct access to the images within HealthStore, in ‘patient context’, providing clinicians a 360-degree view of all patient imaging data.
Conroy continued: “Having all of our images available in a central repository, like HealthStore, is a huge benefit to the Trust, especially when it comes to business continuity planning. With an increasing reliance on applications, HealthStore allows us to access our medical images even during major system upgrades to the PACS. This means that departments can still function as normal, with clinicians continuing to access and view images, with little to no impact on patient service.”
Tony Tomkys, Vice-President of UK and Ireland at BridgeHead Software comments: “We’re delighted to continue our longstanding partnership with Gateshead Health. As a Fast Follower in the Global Digital Exemplar programme, the Trust is committed to breaking down departmental silos to give clinicians a single view of critical patient information. By reducing complexity and increasing efficiencies across clinical workflows, we’re confident that HealthStore can play a substantial role in helping Gateshead Health to achieve its digital ambitions, such as HIMSS Level 7, and in the delivery of the best possible patient care.”
