South Island links into national image exchange solution

NEWS - eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth

Four South Island districts have gone live with PACSLink, providing staff with easier access to radiology images and reports from around the country.

More than 30 radiology providers nationwide are now using the service, which means staff can pull radiology images and reports from other services automatically.

Canterbury, West Coast, South Canterbury and Nelson Marlborough districts of Te Whatu Ora (previously DHBs) went live with the system in February 2022.

These four regions already share a regional Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS).

SI regional radiology systems manager Hayley Stewart says that previously, staff would have to spend time sending emails and placing phone calls to other DHBs or providers to request images or reports be transferred.

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This process was hugely time-consuming, taking up to ten minutes per request and some patients might need images for up to ten studies and/ or reports to be transferred.

“Radiology images are sent around the country, all day, every day,” says Stewart.

“This enables us to securely retrieve image studies and reports from other radiology PACS and we don’t have to email or phone them, we just log into PACSLink. There’s an audit trail showing what users have pulled which studies and when, which is really important for ensuring patient privacy is protected.”

Stewart says the whole process now takes less than a minute.

“The staff members love it and now have a lot more time to do other important tasks: it saves them hours,” she says.

In one case a doctor requested a radiology image study while in the operating theatre and it was available within the PACS before they got off the phone, something that would previously have been impossible.

Another benefit is that the reports are now presented alongside the images in the PACS viewer, rather than separately in the Radiology Information System, which clinicians find really useful, Stewart explains.

PACSLink was launched in March 2018 with a number of radiology providers in Auckland and was initially only able to access radiology images. In June 2020, access was provided to the radiology reports as well.

In March 2018, PACSlink conducted around 6,500 searches and moved 1,700 studies from one PACS system to another.

In March 2022, that number had increased to more than 1.3 million searches and moving nearly 80,000 studies from PACS to PACS.

PACSLink founder Michael Stanger says it was created out of a need to have easier access to patient images and reports.

“Prior to PACSLink, your only option to access images was to log into other private providers PACS systems and search each PACS system individually for relevant patient images and reports,” he explains.

“We did not have the ability to search DHB PACS systems so would either have to email or phone through requests. Tracking down prior images and reports was hugely time consuming and cumbersome.”

A monthly calculation of time saved at the four Northern districts (formerly DHBs) showed more than 1000 hours of staff time saved every month using the system.

He says the PACSLink API also means providers can send a list of patients booked for the following day and the system automatically requests relevant prior studies to be sent back to the requestors PACS, automating the entire process.

Watch the webinar presentation, Imaging Informatics in Aotearoa NZ.



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