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The UK's National Health Service's Connecting for Health (NHS CFH) announced today that its Picture Archiving and Communications System (PACS) has captured more than 100 million x-rays and scans, and has achieved 50% of its planned deployments with 65 systems installed across the NHS during the past 20 months.

Reaching these milestones at the start of December 2006 underlines the clear progress made by the PACS Programme and reflects the robust and consistent project management and commitment of all involved in its delivery.

PACS Programme Head, Mary Barber, said: "Reaching 50% of PACS deployments from a standing start is a real milestone achievement for NHS Connecting for Health and the 65 trusts that have the PACS system. We have patient stories that show they are experiencing shorter waiting times in Accident and Emergency and fewer delays in receiving their results. Trusts are also starting to see improvements in workflow efficiency and cost savings from the end of wet film processing."

Much like a digital camera, PACS captures x-rays and scans and stores them electronically. This replaces the old way of capturing x-rays and scans on film and paper, where they could be lost or misplaced because there was only ever one copy of the image.

Capturing images electronically and archiving them securely brings a number of additional benefits to the NHS. For example, x-rays and scans are available much more quickly because they no longer need to be transported by hand; clinical images are instantly and simultaneously available for study at multiple locations, aiding swift and accurate diagnosis; whilst the flexible viewing enabled by computer screens with PACS also means conditions may be more effectively diagnosed.

More than 100 million individual patient x-ray and scan studies have now been captured and stored by the NHS CFH PACS programme.

Laurence Sutton, consultant radiologist and national clinical lead for PACS and data migration and retention at NHS CFH, said: "Storing over 100 million patient images demonstrates our continued success in delivering PACS to the NHS and the benefits trusts are realising by using PACS and going filmless. If you imagine 100 million images as standard size x-ray films, as they were captured in the past, not only would these have resulted in substantial costs for film processing, but if you laid them all out on the ground together like carpet, the number of images needing to be physically stored would cover an area roughly the size of 1,250 football pitches.

"The way that we can now capture and store these images electronically really is a fantastic achievement for the NHS and for patient care. Although this is a large number of images, this figure is also just a small proportion of what we can achieve with the national PACS programme; the next steps are to enable sharing of these images between other health care organisations across England.