Linköping, Sweden – August 11, 2020 – International medical imaging IT and cybersecurity company Sectra (STO: SECT B) has signed a contract for a region-wide multimedia archive as a cloud service with SWASH, a British consortium of NHS trusts. It is the second contract between Sectra and SWASH this year and is expected to advance how hospitals share and access important diagnostic imaging. A new shared multimedia archive will also allow the trusts to accelerate ambitions for initiatives including artificial intelligence.

SWASH includes the NHS trusts: Portsmouth Hospitals NHS Trust, Isle of Wight NHS Trust, Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust, Southern Health NHS Foundation Trust and University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust.

Under the new arrangement, signed in August 2020, the trusts will move from an existing vendor-neutral archive (VNA) to Sectra’s VNA to store imaging for the region.

“Moving to Sectra’s VNA will be a big win. We will be able to administer, store and make available millions of images, of different types and from different disciplines, from hospitals across our region, all in a single place without the burden of having to manage infrastructure,” says Mark Gardner, PACS manager at Portsmouth Hospitals NHS Trust.

The arrangement will alleviate traditional burdens placed on trusts, freeing up significant resource and equipment from trusts’ computer rooms, for which they have historically been individually responsible.

Sectra will use its cloud to securely store the region-wide archive, and to host the existing solution for handling radiology images (PACS) – a tool already used by radiology professionals in the consortium to interrogate diagnostic images. This follows an announcement earlier in 2020, that SWASH had signed an eight-year contract with Sectra that would see a single instance of its radiology imaging solution delivered across all of the trusts, removing technical complexity previously required to support a single view of patient imaging across the region.

It is hoped that the latest agreement will take regional working to the next level and allow imaging to easily be shared with hospitals outside the consortium.

Dr. Mark Griffiths, paediatric radiologist and clinical lead for the SWASH consortium, says: “Linking with other regions is an important next step. Our strategy is to improve our visualization of the whole patient pathway within SWASH and beyond. Using a standard for cross-community sharing will help us to better connect with other regional consortia. That will be a game changer – to not just see local imaging, but to understand imaging has occurred for patients who move across borders and services, and to be able to access that imaging myself as a clinician, without needing to ask someone else who might not be in the office at the time.”

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