Goodbye and a big good luck to Tom Moreton who worked for us during Rashmi’s maternity leave. We wish him all the best with his round-the-world trip!
And welcome back to Rashmi, returning from maternity leave and keen to get back into work, welcome!
marco
We have been rolling out bbRad version 2.13 across all our installed base, and have scheduled with our users 13th, 14th, and 21st December out of hours to batch a large number of sites, targeting the oldest versions installed.
These updates will also include our latest auto-update mechanism, so from now on, all sites will be automatically kept up-to-date.
We have also asked sites to configure firewalls to enable access to a new backup bbRad.net service, which will come on-line in early 2012.
Dec 072011
Please come and visit Tom and Opey!
Cypher IT’s 2013 Transition Service, comprising full Data Migration and exoPACS Vendor Neutral Archive are being exhibited at the NHS South of England PACS/RIS Showcase Event today and tomorrow, 7th & 8th December.
The event, held at the Arora Hotel near Gatwick Airport, allows us to showcase to a wider audience how NHS Trusts save money by starting their 2013 Transition early, running concurrently with their OJEU procurements.
If you’re unable to make the event, please email Opey on pacs2013@cypherit.co.uk
NHS South of England comprises South Central, South East Coast and South West Strategic Health Authorities.
It has been asked “Why use a VNA for an intermediate archive?” This is a good question, because at first sight it would seem sensible to keep the VNA once the data is transferred to it.
There are two answers to this question:
First, procurement – our Transition Service means NHS Trusts regain local ownership of their data, moving themselves from a weak negotiating position into a strong one, thus saving money. Even if staying with the existing vendor, there are ‘migration’ costs to move data out of the DataCentre onto local storage. As committing to a VNA architecture for a long contract means going to OJEU, that decision cannot be made ahead of time. So our transition service delivers cash savings, irrespective of whether Trusts procure a new PACS or extend the existing vendor’s contract. This is further explained here.
Second, clinical usability – in order to be able to ‘switch off’ the Data Centre contract as soon as possible (and start saving money), historical data must be kept clinically usable, i.e. up to date. This is achieved through standard interfacing of demographic updates, a feature not available is the data in just a basic DICOM archive (or off-line). An outline schematic is here.
Huge congratulations to our support developer Rashmi and her husband Santosh on the the birth of their first baby, a boy called Advay born on 10th June. Mum and baby are doing fine 
We have recently been rolling out bbRad version 2.12.xx. This has:
- Support for McKesson Medcon Cardiology PACS archives
- Better workflow and integration with third-party systems, such as Ardeo eMDT, so patient referrals on authorised systems automatically transfer imaging
- Easier navigation, thanks to a single Studies List, improved layout, fonts, and bbRad statuses
- Easier workflow, as you can specify whether patient no, accession no, etc are mandatory for data quality or not
- Easier administration, with simplified edit dialogs, and more items are now configuable in the Admin Console rather than ini files
- The ability to attach and download files, such as PDFs and clinical letters. This feature is a beta release.
- User-driven DICOM Query/Retrieve, thanks to a new screen on the Admin Console
- Improved report handling, including report pull, DICOM SR, and HL7 improvements
- Various bugfixes and performance enhancements
We will post separately about how the developments that are being worked on now for 2.13.xx version will help you.
Finally, you may wonder what happened to versions 2.10.xx and 2.11.xx – they were internal and locale-specific branches respectively. So 2.12.xx is a merge of these two developments, as well as new features listed above.
The Basingstoke Liver Referral Service have reduced the time between MDT referral and clinical response following MDT from up to 6 weeks to a matter of days (see Clinical Services Journal article)
This has been achieved by streamlining communications through Ardeo’s eMDT product, rather than a mix of post, email, fax, telephone and image transfer notifications, as clarifying and correcting information from these various sources and correcting missing information can take between two to six weeks.
This is much more than just images, but the image component is handled by our bbRad eMDT module, known as the Ardeo Image Management (AIM) module. It integrates authenticated, automated image transfers tightly into eMDT’s functionality, allowing sites achieve the huge benefits that Basingstoke are enjoying.
This could be hugely beneficial to our customers and their patients, so over the coming months Opey, or Paul or Peter from Ardeo, will be contacting sites that may benefit from this. In the meantime, do call or send Opey an email, and we’ll send you further information.
Welcome, Kings College Hospital! The world-famous hospital went live with bbRad Mammo on the 29th November 2010, along with Gibraltar and Mitera Hospital in Athens, making 75 sites in the bbRad network. Thank you all for your support!
Together the three sites, and Princess Elizabeth Hospital, Guernsey, use bbRad for their offshore mammography reporting needs.
To share with any of these sites, please send from your bbRad admin console here, or set them up as a favourite here. And their contact details if needed are of course on the customer portal.