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PACS from McKesson delivers anywhere, anytime access to medical images, facilitating improvements in patient care and creating workflow that helps with time and cost savings

Europe’s largest partnership of healthcare professionals and the first company of its kind in the UK, has signed a strategic partnership with McKesson UK, the trusted healthcare technology solutions and services provider, to deliver a cutting-edge medical imaging solution to its revolutionary new hospital in Bath, UK.

Circle is a partnership of 2,000 healthcare professionals with six facilities across the UK. It is a visionary organisation, investing in its members to empower them to deliver the best possible healthcare to patients. The CircleBath Hospital is fully digital, integrating the best IT solutions available on the market to create a stimulating working environment and deliver an efficient and effective health service to its NHS and private patients. Circle saw a strong synergy with technology and healthcare expert McKesson to continue the digital excellence of the hospital with plans to roll this out further across the UK. CircleBath opened its doors in March this year.

The hospital brings together the best in service, architectural design and clinical practice. The hospital offers care covering 28 specialities, delivered from acclaimed new facilities designed by Foster + Partners.

The picture archiving and communications system ( PACS ) from McKesson creates an entirely filmless and paperless environment, enabling rapid access and storage of medical images. All images are stored centrally, giving secure instant access to clinicians who can share and utilise this information at the point of care, from any location and at any time – even from home.

It is a powerful tool that integrates with existing systems to create a digital workflow that reduces the time and cost of labour-intensive administrative processes and facilitates improvements in patient care. With a significant footprint across Canada, Europe and the US, where the solution has a highly credible reputation, McKesson is now offering this solution to public and private hospitals in the UK on top of this extensive experience, McKesson has a large share of the UK Cardiology PACS market.

Simon Waddington, Partner & Radiography lead at CircleBath, said, “From a PACS user / Administrator perspective McKesson PACS meets the specified performance benchmarks. It is rich in functionality, reflecting our ambition to utilise the best technology to deliver the best possible patient experience. It is easy to use and has many benefits over other products I have used, such as a single user interface for general administration tasks; a standard appearance and system of use between the Radiology reporting and web user front- ends; a web tool that allows writing, editing and verifying of reports through remote access; Customisation of hanging protocols; and integration into the front-end of other third party products, for example orders and results systems, voice dictation and 3D reconstruction.”

Waddington continues, “From a project perspective, McKesson is a flexible, responsive and helpful partner. Their experienced teams provided clear and helpful guidance in complex decisions, and were sensitive and adaptive to the changes we needed to make as the project progressed. Questions were always dealt with clearly and quickly and there were no surprises in the project. The McKesson project team took care of the installation and training and left us with a reliable and fully functional system. Since go-live we have added some new modalities and requested configuration changes and the support service has been excellent in handling these requests.

Waddington adds, “Overall from an IT perspective the project has gone extremely well and we are confident in McKesson ’s ability to support us in the short and long term.

Circle’s clinicians will quickly seek demonstrable benefits from the McKesson system, including clinical satisfaction, operational efficiency and significant time and cost savings.”

Clinicians recognise the limitations of a film-based process of capturing, storing and displaying medical images. McKesson ’s PACS makes these medical images available to more clinicians, anywhere and anytime, at the click of a button, reducing patient waiting times significantly and helping to meet national targets and ultimately transforming patient care. By removing the administrative burden of accessing films, PACS releases time to care and greatly enhances the clinical workflow, improving the overall operation of the organisation. Additionally, McKesson ’s PACS has a low operating cost, and delivers instant improvements in the utilisation of images for best diagnosis.

Rod O’Reilly, president, McKesson , Medical Imaging Group, says, “ McKesson ’s extensive experience in delivering scalable medical imaging solutions, integrating to a hospital’s existing medical technology and providing a configurable workflow for all users, supports the demands of highly innovative hospitals from Circle. McKesson is pleased to offer our proven capabilities to the UK and are excited to be part of a successful partnership with Circle.”

Source: McKesson