"Our vision wasn't for a PACS system - this is a means to an end. The real vision is about how we want to take forward patient care. Our new approach will enable clinical communities and multi-disciplinary teams to come together around the patient in a way we presently can't do. The PACS platform is an essential component to taking forward a new model of care in Greater Manchester, allowing digital images to form part of the core patient record and to create a holistic persona for the patient that our clinicians can use much more effectively than we have ever done before."

Dr. Rhidian Bramley, a clinical lead for the program and consultant radiologist at The Christie NHS Foundation Trust, said: "This agreement represents the culmination of many years of work. A single, unified record will help to avoid delays that come with manually transferring images between individual hospitals. It will help us to reduce variation in waiting times and improve equity in access. For cancer, this will help us to meet our objective to diagnose more patients at an earlier stage to help to save thousands more lives. And the platform itself will make a significant difference to professionals, providing modern tools to report images whilst allowing us to embrace emerging artificial intelligence and to support important programs of research."

The contract was signed during October 2020. The new platform will be used to process up to four million examinations per year and will be deployed across the eight NHS trusts at different stages, with the first going live in 2020. Trusts involved include:

Bolton NHS Foundation Trust
The Christie NHS Foundation Trust
Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust
The Northern Care Alliance NHS Group - which brings together hospitals in Salford, Oldham, Bury and Rochdale across Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust and The Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust
Stockport NHS Foundation Trust
Tameside and Glossop Integrated Care NHS Foundation Trust
Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh NHS Foundation Trust
Dr. Rizwan Malik, a clinical lead for the program and interim divisional medical director at The Royal Bolton Hospital, said: "We will have a modern imaging system deployed region wide that will enable us to liberate the geography of patient management, in keeping with how we practice medicine, where patients move from one site to another. In any multidisciplinary setting we can have a more informed meaningful discussion about a patient. And if they present out of hours, we don't need to wait until the office opens in the morning to access their imaging.

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