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Sectra Taps peerVue QICS to Support Innovative Digital National Physician Education Network

peerVue has been selected to provide comprehensive teaching file capabilities for Sectra’s groundbreaking NIPACS nationwide medical image management and communication solution in Northern Ireland.   Seamlessly integrated with Sectra’s RIS/PACS technology, which shares imaging information across organizational and regional boundaries, peerVue’s innovative QICS (Qualitative Intelligence and Communications System) will enable users to author and publish cases from the NIPACS archive to system-wide teaching file worklists.  Using these worklists, physicians throughout the country will be able to share and learn from important radiology cases treated at any public health facility in Northern Ireland, creating an innovative national physician education network.

“This QICS installation demonstrates the capability of advanced IT technology to link physicians over vast distances into an integrated community for the pooling of knowledge and experience to enhance physician education and patient care.  QICS will enable a unique forum for the exchange of imaging information and ideas and provide a model for far-reaching physician education that can be replicated worldwide,” comments Kyle Lawton, peerVue CEO.  “The scope of the teaching file capability in Northern Ireland is unprecedented, as is the entire Sectra NIPACS image management installation.” 

One of the world’s largest RIS / PACS projects, NIPACS was conceived, in part, to make a patient‘s full radiology history immediately available whenever needed at the point of care in any medical facility in Northern Ireland.  It also enables streamlined remote exam reading, specialist follow-up and multi-disciplinary team discussions.   These and other advanced capabilities are based on implementation of a single common Sectra PACS and RIS platform throughout all public medical facilities and draw on the power of two centralized data centers in Belfast, where Sectra PACS/RIS and the peerVue QICS will reside.  All applications, including QICS, are downloadable as thin-clients from virtual servers to minimize costs and provide for simple system upgrade and scalability. Image archives are housed in a series of satellite sites serving specific regions of the country.  The NIPACS solution is a project of the Department of Health, Social Services and Public Safety (DHSSPS).

Functioning within this sophisticated architecture, peerVue QICS will enable users to access patient images from any location, wherever the data is stored.  Ensuring patient privacy and HIPAA compliance for teaching files, QICS removes all patient data and enables image annotation as desired.  All files can be easily categorized and marked with custom fields to create site-tailored formats.  They can then be published in either jpeg or DICOM format to customizable, searchable worklists for permission-based access.  The QICS is launched directly from the NIPACS application for ultra-fast and simple access.

Aidan Bennett, Regional Director for Sectra, notes that, “We selected peerVue to provide this teaching file functionality for this important installation after a thorough search of competing solutions.peerVue QICS is easy-to-use and extremely reliable yet offers a full range of sophisticated features. User friendly functionality with quick and easy access providing seamless performance from multiple remote locations were core requirements for our end users. Its thin client architecture and ability to integrate seamlessly with our PACS was another plus, as was peerVue’s willingness to customize the solution to the NIPACS project’s needs.”

“Sectra’s NIPACS project is an ambitious, groundbreaking effort that promises to become a showcase for the aggregation and sharing of medical information and resources on regional and national levels,” said Lawton.  “We are pleased and proud to have been selected to contribute to this project.”

Currently, 26 hospitals are connected to the NIPACS system with installations continuing at additional sites.  The peerVue QICS is expected to go live this August.

Source: peerVue