Patients the winners as x-rays and scans go digital

Hawkes Bay District Health Board is going digital with a number of its imaging services, including x-rays and MRI scans - a move it expects will help patients and save money.

The services, which also include CT scans, now put radiology information and picture archives online, which allows radiologists and clinicians to view digitally stored information and images quickly and easily.

Board chairman Kevin Atkinson said the system would improve the health service received by patients in the area.

"That means that our clinicians working in the Napier Health Centre don't have to wait to get films sent over from Hastings," he said.

"They can go onto their computer screen and pull it straight up while the patient is there."

Atkinson said the system took less than a year to develop and could save the board more than $700,000 each year. The previous 12-year-old system relied on traditional development, delivery and storage of film-based x-ray images.

The service is operating at the regional hospital in Hastings and health centres at Napier, Central Hawkes Bay and Wairoa.

Over the next five years, the board projects savings of $835,000 in materials, consumables, support agreements and depreciation costs, with an additional $400,000 a year in productivity savings.

The board agreed last May to a $1.5 million capital investment and selected General Electric Healthcare and IT solutions company Gen-i as project partners. The five-year service charge contract with Gen-i is worth about $500,000 annually, with an option to renew for another five years.

Gen-i will host and manage the application, removing the need for individual installation and IT management at each clinical site.

The system sends images to Gen-i's data storage centre, where they can be accessed by clinicians using high-speed internet connections.

Gen-i national solutions manager Andrew Allan said that in one example, up to 200 individual brain-scan images could be digitally stored and examined to pinpoint the exact location of a tumour.

 

He said the system was designed to cover other possible future applications, including the storage of cardiology, pathology and ultrasound results.

Such healthcare IT systems were not more widespread because of a reluctance to outsource core clinical applications, said Allan.

Multiple layers of information security and system redundancy were necessary to meet any clinical management concerns.

 

Atkinson said the move to a digital system would also help to recruit and keep radiographers.

He hoped other health boards facing similar system upgrades would visit Hawkes Bay to see the online service in action.

"Some of the feedback that I hear sometimes disappoints me because on occasions everyone's got to do their own thing ... and not necessarily say, 'Gosh, Hawkes Bay have been able to do this extremely successfully. We must have a look at that'," he said.

"As a sector, sometimes the capital that the Government invests is not producing the most effective results."

The online image management system also has voice-recognition capability enabling the automatic translation into written text of dictated radiology results.

Atkinson said work continued on digitalising patient records, linking prescriptions and laboratory results to clinical records.

"One of the concerns I've always had is this proliferation of bits of paper," he said. "The deployment of the technology on this project is going to go quite a considerable way to eliminating that."

Health Minister Annette King officially launched the new system on Friday.