Bournemouth and Christchurch Hospitals Go Filmless with Aspyra PACS

Challenge

The Royal Bournemouth and Christchurch Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust wanted to increase the access to its radiology images, from within the organization and for radiologists to access images from remote locations.

Solution

The organization chose the AccessNET™ PACS solution from Aspyra, LLC to enable them to successfully become a truly filmless environment.

Results

Even large CT studies (2,000-plus images), can be loaded from anywhere on the hospital network (100 Mbps) at an average speed of 30 images per second. Even laptops using the wireless LAN (11 Mbps) get very acceptable results.

The Royal Bournemouth and Christchurch Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust chose the Aspyra AccessNET PACS Solution to enable them to successfully become a truly filmless environment. The Trust has 842 beds across two hospitals and serves a population of over 500,000 people.

Aspyra devised a unique PACS (picture archive and communications systems) architecture that married Citrix and client technology with a clustered server design to provide a powerful and resilient solution that not only satisfied the Trust's requirements but also surpassed them.

Using thin-client technology, the Aspyra MedVIEW application is actually run on the server and not the client. Therefore, only the resulting image is sent across the network to the user's computer screen. This dramatically reduces the amount of network traffic, which is often a major consideration when implementing a PACS within an established institution.

The clustered server design facilitates both “load balancing,” which enables a dynamic management of the resources to maintain an optimum level of performance regardless of the demands put upon it, and provides an exceptional solution for “fault tolerance.” Should one part of the system fail, a duplicate component will bridge the problem, meaning the end user's experience will be unaffected. The combination of these technologies has resulted in a unique configuration, providing speed, resilience, access and cost effectiveness.

Jon Teece, Radiology PACS manager, lists the following benefits: “We use thin-client technology to deploy images across the Trust. This provides us with tremendous speed. Even very large CT studies (2,000-plus images), can be loaded from anywhere on the hospital network (100 Mbps) at an average speed of 30 images per second. Even laptops using the wireless LAN (11 Mbps) get very acceptable results.

“And, because of the clustered server design, there is no scheduled downtime - we can shut down one server and the others maintain a seamless service. With regard to teleradiology, our doctors can connect to the Trust from their homes (through VPN established by the Trust), and can recall uncompressed images on demand. This works well even on a 33 Kbps connection.”

Operational efficiencies have resulted in real patient benefits. Paul Shelton, senior clinical leader, comments: “The advent of a filmless hospital has had dramatic benefits on the imaging time for patients in all disciplines. PACS has been a significant factor in increasing throughput on our multi-slice scanners by 38% in the first quarter of this year, compared with the same period last year. Most dramatic has been the waiting times for outpatient plain film examinations. Patients regularly waited more than an hour, whereas it is now very rare for patients to wait longer than 30 minutes since we went filmless, despite a 6 % increase in workload.”