The Rotherham NHS Foundation Trust is a combined acute and community Trust and one of the first thirty-five Trusts in England and Wales to achieve NHS Foundation Trust status. Opened in 1978, it has developed a reputation as a thriving organisation and achieves clinical recognition all over the country. As an Associate Teaching Hospital of the University of Sheffield, the hospital offers an active research programme – delivered through local, regional, national and international research networks.

The Trust provides a full range of district hospital and community services to Rotherham and the surrounding areas, serving a population of 264,700 people. Their aim is to build healthier patient futures; they are committed to integrating hospital and community services to empower Trust staff to deliver optimised clinical outcomes.

The Rotherham Hospital NHS Foundation Trust has been a long-standing Agfa HealthCare customer, using imaging solutions within their Radiology department since 2006. This department offers routine and specialist imaging services, such as breast imaging, fluoroscopy, angiography, ultrasound, CT, MRI and DEXA scanning, and relied on Agfa Healthcare’s RIS and Scheduling to support their clinical diagnostics and imaging workflows. As clinical and administrative pressures on the Trust began to increase, Rotherham identified that an enhanced suite of solutions, Agfa HealthCare Enterprise Imaging, were available on the market, and could provide additional functionality, specialist workflows and clinical value to their radiology processes. In 2020, the project team appointed Agfa HealthCare to provide their Enterprise Imaging solution, and the implementation started immediately with the objective of a March 2021 cut-over.

The Rotherham NHS Foundation Trust’s solution hosts PACS-led reporting and required significant storage and clinical reporting capability. To support this requirement, Agfa HealthCare implemented Enterprise Imaging (EI); deployed as an integrated EI and VNA solution, combined with the XERO Universal Viewer. In addition, 48TB of storage was realised and 47 reporting and clinical workstations were deployed, as well as homeworking activated for clinicians – with more than eighty reporting staff trained and supported.

Agfa HealthCare’s Project Management team demonstrated their experience with a series of significant migration tasks- including nearly 3 million HL7 orders from RIS, 100,000 HL7 orders from NBSS Viewpoint and 2.5-million DICOM studies from the IMPAX® Data Centre. In addition, integration skillsets were exercised with smooth interfacing with other Trust clinical systems – Meditech EPR and NBBS Breast Screening.

On the 13th March 2021, Agfa HealthCare continued its project momentum – delivering its 34th Enterprise Imaging Go-Live in the UK since 2017. 

For the future, as Rotherham is part of the South Yorkshire and Bassetlaw regional network (together with Sheffield Teaching, Sheffield Children’s, Barnsley, Doncaster and Chesterfield), they plan to connect these Trusts together to form the XERO® Exchange Network (XEN) – a vital move towards a pan-Yorkshire shared workflow, with aims to integrate to the Trusts’ Cardiology and HNC Viewpoint Obstetric Solutions.

You can read more about the Entreprise Imaging Platform here.