Norfolk & Norwich NHS Foundation Trust

Norfolk & Norwich NHS Trust opts for a fully integrated and customisable RIS from Soliton IT.

Norfolk & Norwich University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust provides optimum levels of acute care, including clinical and specialist services, for a catchment area of eight-hundred thousand people. The Trust’s team of six-thousand staff treats local patients and handles referrals from one-hundred local GP practices, neighbouring Hospitals and other Primary Care Trusts around the country. As an NHS Foundation Trust, Norfolk & Norwich plays an important role in the teaching and training of a wide range of health professionals in partnership with local universities and, uniquely, offers a full electronic ordering responsibility for their primary and secondary care subsidiaries. The Trust prides itself on its practical organisational structure, point-of-care ethic and the efficient turnaround of patient treatments.

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Dated linear process and lack of customising proved inflexible

IT solutions and supporting healthcare programs are a vital part to the smooth autonomy of Norfolk & Norwich’s performance to create accurate data provisions between sites and traceable audit trails for future reference. The Trust’s Radiology department hosted a Radiology Information System (RIS) – TC-Rad – from U.S provider McKesson. In 2013 the supplier withdrew TC-Rad from UK markets – with its associated support quickly following – and Lead Radiologist Dr Richard Goodwin assessed the Trust’s current RIS capabilities against the growing department’s requirements and sought a replacement solution. The department’s previous RIS had its issues; the basic interface was limited in its abilities and offered few configuration options to enable Richard’s department to customise the application around their 26-consultants. Additionally, the voice recognition (VR) element was tiered in process; a third-point intermediary broker application, Talking Point, knitted the Dragon VR to TC-Rad and consequently created a process which was cumbersome in practice – causing the department to work around multiple applications from different vendors.

Norfolk & Norwich’s previous system was analogue in its nature and linear as a process. Radiology+ integrated all necessary process elements and information with data available at our fingertips – intuitively and with greater customisation. Importantly, Radiology+ has the prospect to evolve around advancing Trust and sector demands to accommodate and

Lead Radiologist & IT Lead - Norfolk & Norwich NHS Foundation Trust

A new RIS – key specifications of seamless data migration and smooth voice recognition

Norfolk & Norwich had firm requirements for the replacement RIS, with basic contracted specifications including value for money and a like-for-like functional replacement for the former TC-Rad system. Feature requirements were more specific; the new application needed to be customisable to the Trust and its respective users and provide assistive features such as urgency grading options, worklists and appointment systems. Technical pre-requisites included an efficient VR engine, integration into their Fuji PACS, internal statistics package and, vitally, seamless migration of old data to the new platform. Along with the NNUH procurement team, Richard sought recommendations from the NHS Supply Chain, who nominated the UK’s only standalone RIS solutions providers – Soliton IT and HSS. He also sought endorsements from his former Trust, St George’s Hospital in London, who advocated the leading RIS developer Soliton IT with its Radiology+ product and second-to-none support service. NNUH assessed both RIS suppliers and ultimately opted for Soliton’s Radiology+ on the evaluative basis of its prestige customisability opportunities, flexible modular structure and truly system-integrated VR.

A Trust recommendation – Radiology+ takes the lead

The Radiology department saw instant results with the chosen solution. The migration of data from TC-Rad to the fresh RIS was a comfortable transition handled well by Soliton’s project management team. Additionally, the solution training programs were expertly appointed and executed to assist department-wide operational confidence within the new system. From a process perspective, the Radiology team saw optimised automation of the department’s tasks with a fully integrated flow of data-entry, VR and reporting actions as opposed to the tiered stages of the legacy RIS.

Richard comments:

“A tangible improvement was the entire migration from paper-based appointment scheduling to a totally digitalised system within Radiology+”. Key features also included inter-departmental messaging to improve communications and in-program customisable worklists to assist Radiologist’s working practices and improve time management. Richard also reported greater visibility of departmental demand and capacity – a new requirement that he envisions becoming a standard practice for national Trust operations.