As one of the largest providers of healthcare services in England, the Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust delivers a full range of local and community healthcare services for the Sheffield and South Yorkshire community. Founded in 2001, the Trust delivers services across five hospital sites, including the city’s two major adult acute sites – the Northern General and Royal Hallamshire Hospitals. The Trust is recognised as one of the UK’s largest, busiest and most successful NHS Foundation Trusts, providing care for over 2 million patients, as well as offering clinical education to the University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University students.
The Trust has a long history of providing clinical excellence and innovative research, and is recognised internationally for work in neurosciences, cancer treatment, transplantation, orthopaedics and efficiencies in diagnostics including in cardiology and radiology. It is within these specialities where the Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust invested in global innovator Agfa HealthCare for the provision of the Enterprise Imaging (EI) solution.
Agfa HealthCare and the Trust started their relationship in 2007 with a deployment of an Agfa HealthCare IMPAX image management system. After six years of routine use across the Trust, the need for digital systems to support advances in radiology working practices was increasing, bringing the Trust to work with Agfa HealthCare again to enhance their PACS solution to the EI platform.
Sheffield Teaching Hospitals had firm criteria for the upgrade, including implementing a single solution approach for their diagnostic departments, which, over a staged deployment, was to incorporate both radiology and cardiology into the same platform. Close integration within their clinical reporting tasks was also important.
The upgraded EI solution provides digital imaging review and reporting, with enhanced Voice Recognition (VR) and integrated RIS systems, enabling a strong clinical reporting capability to support a streamlined service. Agfa HealthCare also provided complex workflow solutions to accommodate the vast range of Trust specialisms. In particular, EI interfaced with seven other third-party clinical systems – including TeraRecon, TraumaCad and SyngoVia – all of which required specialist configuration to provide seamless integration.
In July 2021, Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust went live with Enterprise Imaging for Radiology, with the implementation of Cardiology completed in December 2021. Agfa HealthCare is delighted to deploy its solutions into a respected and pioneering NHS Trust, and celebrates the technological investment made by both organisations.