The Cheshire and Merseyside districts in the UK have merged ten Picture Archiving and Communications Systems (PACS) and Radiology Information Systems (RIS) into one shared multi-site virtual PACS. The merger of the complex multi-institution health economy was presented at the 2015 European Congress of Radiology (ECR) in Vienna (Austria).

 

The virtual PACS allows the health economy to function as a single institution, and the new workflow enables cross-site reporting, reporting outside office hours, and separation of the acquisition from the reporting workflow.

 

The health institutions included seven acute district hospitals, a regional cancer center, a pediatric tertiary center, and three small specialist hospitals, together generating with a more than 2 million exams per year. The requirements that the new PACS had to fulfill included the implementation of a single master identifier, separated acquisition and reporting, a single study instance, and display of prior exams.

 

The PACS system that was selected was the Carestream (Rochester, NY, USA) Multi-Site Virtual PACS. The system was installed under budget, and within the six-month timetable. More than 100 terabytes of data was migrated into the system.