London NHS Trusts Adopt Unified Cloud Imaging System
Two NHS trusts in North West London will migrate to a joint, fully managed cloud service for enterprise imaging provided by Sectra. The move is intended to improve collaboration among healthcare providers and accelerate patient diagnoses by unifying medical imaging data on a single platform.
- The two specific trusts are London North West University Healthcare NHS Trust and Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, which together serve a population of approximately 1.5 million people. - This initiative is part of the broader North West London Imaging Network strategy, which was first established in 2017 to digitally underpin the sharing of images and reports across the region. - Both trusts were existing Sectra customers; this project involves migrating their on-premise solutions for radiology and breast imaging to a single, shared Sectra One Cloud platform. - The move to a fully managed Software as a Service (SaaS) model offloads infrastructure management, continuous upgrades, and monitoring to Sectra, allowing the trusts' internal IT teams to focus on clinical priorities. - This project aligns with the NHS Long Term Plan, which mandated the establishment of imaging networks across England by 2023 to address rising demand, workforce shortages, and aging equipment. - A key technical benefit of the consolidated cloud platform is the ability to more easily integrate emerging technologies, such as AI, into clinical workflows to support diagnostics. - The unified system is designed to eliminate the need for manual processes for sharing images between hospitals, which can cause delays and lead to unnecessary duplicate scans and patient radiation exposure. - The first NHS trust to deploy a fully cloud-based enterprise imaging service from Sectra was Homerton Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, providing a case study for this type of SaaS implementation within the NHS.
