Cypher IT’s PACS Transition Service saves you money. Building on our Transition Service successes in the Southern Cluster, we can help you migrate from your PACS contract safely, punctually, and cost-effectively. Our Transition service comprises migrating all your PACS data (both local and DataCentre) onto our exoPACS VNA, whether licenced as low-cost DICOM archive version or full Enterprise VNA, and saves you money in three ways

Data migration cost
Storage costs
Minimise overlap of old and new PACS contracts

Can we benefit from your migration experience, without using your exoPACS VNA?

Yes, a migration-only service is available – contact us now for pricing

What if we are already procuring a VNA through OJEU?

Our Transition Service complements that process – you don’t need to wait for that OJEU to complete because we install our VNA to hold your data for a transitory period only. Once your OJEU VNA is installed, the CDS data is moved from our VNA into the OJEU VNA, and our VNA is removed. This reduces the total cost of transition by

Minimising dual running of new and old PACS systems – this represents the most significant cost savings
Reducing direct costs with lower professional fees, for a top quality data migration

Why not just keep the exoPACS VNA? What is the benefit of doing this? Naturally we will bid for your on-going Enterprise VNA business. But even if your data is eventually migrated out of exoPACS into a different vendor (which is free), the benefit is significant savings by keeping the overlap of old PACS and new PACS/VNA vendors to an absolute minimum.

Pricing

Cypher IT are committed to providing the best value offering in the change-over marketplace.

The inclusive pricing for the whole Transition Service and exoPACS VNA is not only well under OJEU thresholds in order to be able to start your transition in a timely fashion, it is the best value for money option available to you.

Business Objectives

With our PACS Transition Service you will achieve the following key Business Objectives:

Reduce total cost of transition

Keep transition costs as low as possible by reducing PACS overlap, avoiding DataCentre contract extension and ensuring options are kept option so that open competition can really drive down prices..

Reduce Storage Costs

SHAs advise to keep all imaging locally, rather than allowing older studies to be deleted from local cache and only be present on the LSP DataCentre.
You can use our exoPACS VNA to benefit from commodity storage instead of using LSP hardware, and thus achieve significant cost savings.

PACS Procurement freedom, avoiding all forms of vendor lock-in

Full unfettered access to your data gives freedom from technical, operational and contractual constraints of LSP PACS, so you can choose the best option for you.

How exoPACS meets these objectives

Huge cost-saving on hardware storage vs Primary PACS.
Avoid expensive dual-running old and new PACS systems; fixed costs for our services.
Flexible architecture for either transitory period, or on-going VNA to your PACS.
IHE Connectathon-proven, open-source base, truly vendor neutral.

Proof of Concept

We appreciate that innovative and forward-thinking NHS IT departments also need to manage internal expectations and constraints, often in terms of risk profile and the timing of return on investment.

Because of this, we are proposing a Proof of Concept stage, with all of the key elements functioning:

Continuous Data Migration
EPR Event Listener against existing RIS
Pre-fetch rules

This price of the Proof of Concept is not additional to the final product price – should you decide to proceed it will be debited from final price. Further, there is NO obligation to proceed with the full service.

Reducing total cost of transition

As well as having competitive pricing for our services, where our Transition Service really saves you the most money is by enabling you to not overlap old and new PACS, and also to switch off you DataCentre connection. Once your new PACS is in and live, you can immediately switch off two huge expenses:

Save revenue charges for the old PACS
Save revenue charges for the LSP DataCentre
In addition, you avoid purchasing a data migration service from your LSP

How? Migrating OUT: Because all your historical data will already be migrated OUT of your old PACS by our Transition Service, you do not need to keep the old PACS running at all. Nor even retain access to the LSP DataCentre.

How? Migrating IN: Furthermore, even if all your historical data isn’t yet migrated IN to your new PACS at the time of go-live, our Prefetch Engine ensures that relevant priors are always made available and online – in your new PACS. Any patient activity will cause that patient’s historical images to be pushed into your new PACS ahead of any inbound data migration. This means the images are available for instant access by clinicians, even before they have clicked on the patient – and often before the patient has even arrived at the hospital.

Our Transition Service and VNA storage will save you money against the cost of an LSP Data Migration plus the cost of dual-running your old PACS. In addition costs for optional services, even integration with new and as-yet-unknown vendors, are fixed and made transparent right at the start.

For example:

If you wish to continue using the exoPACS VNA against your new PACS vendor, the service cost for reconfiguring the Prefetch Engine against the new PACS is fixed in advance.
If you use your new PACS vendor for long term storage (ie if you don’t use a VNA on-going), our Data Migration from your VNA to the new vendor is fixed in advance.
If your new PACS vendor manages the Data Migration from our exoPACS VNA into their storage, then there is NO charge from us – it is FREE.
If you switch your RIS vendor, the cost for reconfiguring the EPR Event listener for the new RIS is fixed in advance

Reduce Storage Costs

The LSP PACS contracts run until 2015 in London. The PACS keeps recent exams stored locally. Both recent and old exams are also stored at the LSP DataCentre (exams are copied to the DataCentre almost as soon as they have been sent to PACS).

Strategic Health Authorities have already advised to remove dependence on the LSP DataCentre by not flushing old exams and keeping all data locally. To do so means providing additional storage, so there is space to keep old exams as well as recent exams. We make savings against these costs.

Transition Service Storage Costs The Transition Service is hosted on an a Trust-supplied Windows machine or virtual machine.

Benefits of exoPACS VNA

Further cost savings as cost of storage continues to reduce.
Easy to expand – add partitions for other imaging units/departments

Avoid Vendor Lock-in

Whether the existing PACS is changed or its contract extended, Trusts want to make the commercially optimum choice, and this requires freedom from technical and contractual constraints related to the existing PACS. This freedom is also essential to a good negotiating position with suppliers.

Continuous Trust-controlled local access to Trust data, especially at the time of contract renewal in 2015, is fundamental to achieving this. This is to ensure there is no dependency on the LSP nor LSP DataCentre at the time of contract renewal.

By hosting the Trust’s data locally in a VNA, and having a known fixed costs for all options going forward, the Trust is free to implement PACS:

With the new VNA paradigm, where storage is managed by the VNA or;
With the old PACS paradigm (old or new supplier), where storage is managed by PACS

A large part of the value of the Transition Service is getting your data out and getting ownership back. However, the value doesn’t end there – and having a known, fixed cost for migrating data out of the LSP and in to the PACS vendor you choose, you are free to choose the most commercially advantageous option:

Use the VNA paradigm on-going
Decommission the VNA

Why decommission the VNA? Isn’t the VNA paradigm the new way forward? Yes. But if this were to be dictated as part of the PACS procurement, this might unduly restrict the number of options. For example, one option that Trusts might want is the existing PACS renewed, but without the LSP DataCentre. This could be with the PACS managing its own storage rather than using a VNA.

Recall that a key business objective is a PACS procurement freedom, so we won’t make the assumption that you’ll use the VNA on-going. But you are free to make that decision.

Would keeping our existing PACS and decommissioning the VNA mean money wasted? No. As you can see from your LSP PACS Storage Costs, the LSP PACS storage costs are disproportionately high. If the negotiating position you achieve by taking control of your own data brings these costs down, and perhaps obviating a ‘migration’ cost from the DataCentre to local PACS, then that is money immeasurably well spent.

Can we use the exoPACS VNA on-going against our PACS, even the existing one? Yes. exoPACS has all the features you need to use it on-going as a VNA for your PACS, new or existing. See the ‘Features in Detail – supporting Business Objectives’, in particular the sections ‘Ensure Priors are Instantly Available to Clinicians’ and ‘Standards-based Image Sharing – IHE XDS-I’

IHE conformance is key to ensuring openness and interoperability, and we have already proven exoPACS at IHE’s Europe Connectathon as an Image Manager/Archive for both general radiology and mammography.

But Cypher IT goes further: our exoPACS VNA is built upon the robust and worldwide-renowned open source archive known as dcm4chee. The source-code is available for download and perhaps more importantly, service contracts are available from third-party companies in the PACS marketplace. In addition, we have never restricted access to configure any of our products in order to charge service fees. Our whole approach is to empower our customers to administer their own system and own their data.