UK PACS & teleradiology conference

The UK PACS & Teleradiology Group, a special interest group of the Royal College of Radiologists, invited delegates to the EHI Live 2010 conference to share its Autumn meeting focused on Next Generation PACS.

The delegate rate was £95+VAT for NHS employees - which included lunch - and entitled the delegate access to all areas of the EHI Live exhibition and other conference sessions.

Our multi-disciplinary membership includes radiologists, radiographers,  healthcare IT professionals and PACS managers – anyone with a keen interest in PACS and clinical IT issues.

We have a highly active public forum with over 3,000 registered users:  http://www.pacsgroup.org.uk/ where a wide range of clinical IT and technical issues are debated, discussed, and best practices are shared. The supplier community keenly follows our forum and contributes to discussions. We build good relationships between the user and supplier community, as we believe this is pivotal to getting high quality clinical IT into the NHS.

PACS has been a high profile success in the NHS.  A key enabler to that success has been the DICOM standard which allows images created on one vendor’s machines to be displayed on another’s. But the PACS community recognises that radiology images must be a part of the wider clinical record of the patient, hence our interest in sharing this meeting with the wider e-health community.

We realise that today’s PACS solutions are creating radiology data silos, and that very soon NHS trusts are going to feel the strains of increasing storage requirements. The PACS technology of today is outdated and no longer meets our clinical requirements for the future.

In 2013, most  NHS Connecting for Health central PACS contracts come to an end. At our Autumn Meeting, co-located with EHI Live 2010, we will focus on Next Generation PACS and the impending move from the DICOM standard to XDS (Cross Data Sharing) /XDS-I (Cross Data Sharing – Imaging) as the standard.
 
At the meeting, group chair, Dr Neelam Dugar introduced the concepts for Next Generation PACS, supported by contributors from the supplier and user communities with time for questions and discussion.

A full agenda of the day's activity can be found here.

Shannon Web from Accuo Techologies described technical architecture for the next generation PACS.  Harm-Jan Wessels from Forecare described how your existing HL7 and DICOM applications could be made XDS compliant without a rip & replace strategy.

Soon NHS is going to feel the strains of a data tsaunami. Storage vendors including  IBM and Hitachi will describe how trusts could consolidate their storage. Mark Oherilhy from Visbion described how current days storage dependent PACS viewers would move to a software-only application-- which are storage independent Alex Heck from GE will describe the advantages of an XDS compliant RIS. Chris Lindop from IHE described how images and documents held in different trusts could be viewed without duplication using XCA as the IHE standard.

The afternoon sessions were dedicated to PACS managers and radiologists discussing what they need from the Next Generation PACS from a user perspective.

To view the full two day conference timings and synopses please click here.