Kettering General Hospital National Health Service (NHS) Foundation Trust in the U.K. is blaming the poor performance of a new PACS for a delay in the reporting of thousands of CT and MRI scans, according to an online report in Digital Health News (DHN).
The delay caused harm for at least one patient and resulted in another 68 cases of potential patient harm since the PACS was installed in June 2016, according to the trust.
In January 2015, EMARD contracted GE Healthcare 30 million euros to implement a cloud-based PACS, RIS, and vendor-neutral archive among seven trusts known as East Midlands Radiology (EMRAD). The plan was to share the technology as a single radiology service, but several trusts have yet to connect.
A Kettering spokesman told DHN that a number of technical issues associated with the implementation have affected the level of radiology reporting and contributed to a reporting backlog.
Adjustments made in October 2016 have since helped to stabilize the system, but a backlog remains. As of last month, there were approximately 9,000 reports waiting for more than 10 days for reading, according to the Kettering Trust.
The DHN report cited a trust spokesman who said it could take until late March for plain film reports to be completed.
The report also quoted GE as saying the system has been stable since the beginning of October and that the company has "worked closely with Kettering prior to that to offer IT and technical support."
GE reported problems with its information system in the Kent and Medway consortiums several months ago, according to a prior report in DHN. In August 2016, the RIS experienced a hardware failure.
