British rads blast U.K. IT initiative

Apr 2, 2009

The U.K.'s rollout of a nationwide healthcare IT network has resulted in isolated local PACS networks that are unable to efficiently share and transfer electronic diagnostic imaging files and related reports.

That's according to a report issued this week by the Royal College of Radiologists (RCR), a London-based professional organization responsible for setting standards of practice in the country. The report, prepared by the organization's information technology subcommittee, criticizes the initiatives of the National Health Service (NHS) Connecting for Health program (formerly known as the National Program for IT) to implement a fully interoperable network of PACS throughout the U.K.

While acknowledging that PACS implementation has been largely successful in individual hospitals, the report contends that automatic image and report sharing was never a contractual requirement for the local service providers who were providing central data stores at a cost of 35 million pounds, even though NHS Trust hospitals were led to believe that the central data stores would be pivotal to automatic image and report sharing.

Other weaknesses identified in the report include:

Failure to recognize the importance of radiology information systems and the importance of integrated image and report file sharing
Lack of a long-term strategy on how radiology reports and images are to be integrated into the electronic patient record
The creation of artificial local service provider cluster boundaries that limit information sharing
An absence of data-sharing standards, such has HL7 or Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) profiles

The RCR report recommends that international open standards be adopted and that all methodology for information sharing should be automated and enable physicians to use a single log-in via one clinical system. The report also recommends the support of a unique single-patient identifier and that user interfaces have the ability to automatically display clinical information from multiple systems.

The report also noted that a number of clinical data recommendations made in 2007 with Connecting for Health staff had not yet been met.

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