Project #SERRIS

Soliton IT and Project SERRIS triumphs in the Radiology Reporting Sharing initiative in Scotland

The contract to provide a radiology reporting management system into the South-East Scotland region has seen huge success as the final site approaches Go-Live and the national contract for Scotland-wide implementation is subsequently awarded to Soliton IT.

The introduction of SERRIS (the South East Regional Reporting Insourcing Solution), is an initiative of inter-Board reporting sharing to include three initial Boards, NHS Fife, NHS Lothian and NHS Borders. Amidst the UK-wide shortage of NHS radiologists, Scotland was seeing an acute shortage with particular challenges in NHS Fife. This site was struggling to meet radiology requirements and were using different methods to meet reporting demands, such as locums and third-party outsourcing companies, proving expensive and difficult to manage when locating and tracking reports. Graham McKillop, Clinical Lead for the SERRIS project, comments:

“The demand on radiology reporting meant that NHS Fife struggled to meet their targets and there was undue pressure on consultants – their jobs were becoming fractious and critical tasks were a challenge in an environment where they were constantly multi-tasking.  Fife needed help from other Boards to meet their clinical reporting demands; we identified that NHS Lothian and Borders had reporting capacity but needed a way of supporting this reporting network with IT.”

Fife prompts the Sharing requirement

As Fife was experiencing the most critical challenges, the SERRIS Project Team identified that an application was needed to route reporting tasks from the Board to other NHS sites to maximise the network of reporting resources across the region. On a project level, this initiative had to provide a connectivity solution which integrates with Carestream PACS and varying sites’ RIS and allows image reporting on every site – feeding back into the host Board’s RIS. Graham identified that they needed a supplier who could offer “vendor-agnostic” sharing functionality to manage the influx of reporting tasks across the participating Boards, whilst supporting the different RIS systems already in place. Graham comments:

“We had been considering a national share platform for some time and, as a region, Scotland were equipped to adopt this network of sharing due to the Boards all being equipped with a national PACS. The key element that was missing was an application that unified the varying network of RIS within our Boards”.

In January 2017, after evaluating 5 vendors, Graham and his team awarded the SERRIS contract to Soliton IT with their Share+ application.

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