NIPACS, Northern Ireland
NIPACS+ will support the creation of regional networks of care and will help the region to transform diagnostic services, as healthcare professionals benefit from a single point of access to medical images.
The Health and Social Care service in Northern Ireland is to transform how diagnostic services are delivered, as it brings together millions of crucial digital patient images into a single system, provided by Sectra.
In one single imaging system, Northern Ireland’s HSC healthcare professionals will be able to access and interact with patient images from a wide range of disciplines, including radiology, cardiology, oncology, obstetrics, endoscopy, medical photography, nuclear medicine, dental and ophthalmology.
I am extremely pleased to support the formal announcement of the NIPACS+ Programme. This software will enable our HSC healthcare professionals to access and interact with patient images from a wide range of disciplines, including radiology, cardiology, and oncology. The fact that images from any hospital within Northern Ireland will be available throughout the region for secondary consultations, will provide massive opportunities to provide enhanced patient care.
Images from any hospital will be available throughout the region for secondary consultations, and cooperation, leading to enhanced patient care as well as reduced cost and increased efficiency.
Permanent Secretary of the Department of Health Peter May said: “I am extremely pleased to support the formal announcement of the NIPACS+ Programme. This software will enable our HSC healthcare professionals to access and interact with patient images from a wide range of disciplines, including radiology, cardiology, and oncology. The fact that images from any hospital within Northern Ireland will be available throughout the region for secondary consultations, will provide massive opportunities to provide enhanced patient care”.
The NIPACS+ programme directly responds to a large number of recommendations in a 2018 Northern Ireland Department of Health strategic framework for imaging services, that set out to transform how imaging services are planned and provided. It called for NIPACS to be expanded into new clinical areas, and for a single radiology information system and picture archiving communication system to be available across all acute sites, integrated with Northern Ireland’s care record systems.
Procured by Northern Ireland’s Business Services Organisation (BSO), the programme will draw on the entirety of Sectra’s enterprise imaging technology suite. It will enable Northern Ireland to manage approximately two million examinations per year.
This programme signals a major step forward in medical diagnostics for Northern Ireland. Moving to one imaging system will mean that from a single point of access healthcare professionals can instantly see all the imaging they need to support patient care.
NIPACS+ will integrate into Health and Social Care’s ‘encompass’ initiative, that is delivering an integrated digital care record across Northern Ireland, making imaging easily available at the point of care.
Dr Cathy Jack Chief Executive of Belfast Trust, said: “This programme signals a major step forward in medical diagnostics for Northern Ireland. Moving to one imaging system will mean that from a single point of access healthcare professionals can instantly see all the imaging they need to support patient care”
The initiative will also support the creation of “enhanced clinical networks”, called for in the 2018 framework. Regional networks of care focussed around specialities such as cardiology and obstetrics, are expected to make better use of scarce specialist expertise and to help to standardise and improve access to imaging services for patients across Northern Ireland.
Patients being transferred to different hospitals, will also benefit from staff having immediate access to imaging captured at other sites. And specialist sites, for example, the major trauma centre or neurology unit at the Royal Victoria Hospital, will be able to review images more easily before patients arrive, in some cases informing decisions on where best to treat a patient.
The programme will support the creation of diagnostic hubs and the development of training facilities. Workforce flexibility, and the ability for healthcare diagnosticians to report on images captured anywhere in the region, will be complemented by home reporting capabilities, which is expected to support recruitment and retention as well as workload balancing across Northern Ireland.
“Northern Ireland is an example for the world in integrated diagnostics. NIPACS has already delivered so much, digitising radiology and more recently pathology, and the benefits delivered are about to be extended and accelerated for more healthcare professionals and their patients across the region. This is an extremely exciting project for Sectra to support.”
Jane Rendall
Managing Director for Sectra in the UK and Ireland
About Business Services Organisation (BSO)
The Business Services Organisation was established to provide a broad range of regional business support functions and specialist professional services to the health and social care sector in Northern Ireland. Part of his business support includes the management of Health and Social Care Programmes and Projects such as NIPACS and Digital Pathology.
About NIPACS
Northern Ireland has six HSC Trusts, five of which produce imaging: the Belfast, South Eastern, Western, Southern and Northern Trusts. These Trusts provide a wide range of integrated health and social care services for a population of 1.8 million covering a geographical area of 14,000km2 Imaging Services are vital in the provision of modern healthcare in Northern Ireland. There are more than 1.75 million radiology examinations carried out by HSCNI annually.
The original Northern Ireland Picture Archiving and Communications System (NIPACS) contract was awarded to Sectra UK Ltd in 2008 covering 28 out of the 30 hospital sites in Northern Ireland. This solution includes a RIS, PACS and VNA. It currently stores and provides access on a single platform to the following speciality types: radiology, dental, breast screening, obstetrics, limited cardiology, and medical photography.
Read the statement issues by the Department of Health: Advanced digital imaging archive to improve patient outcomes | Department of Health (health-ni.gov.uk)
