Dr Neelam Dugar, Consultant Radiologist at Doncaster and Bassetlaw Trust and Informatics Adviser to the Royal College of Radiologists, has campaigned for many years for XDS to be adopted as a standard. Generally PACS users don’t have the ability to view a complete patient record including reports and images from other specialist departments, but by developing an XDS consumer there is the potential to transform healthcare for patients in the UK and globally. Fujifilm have worked with Dr Dugar at Doncaster to create a standards based solution which allows PACS users to view the non-DICOM documents in the XDS consumer.
“XDS as a standard holds a lot of promise for an integrated image and document record” said Dr Dugar. “Currently in healthcare clinical and departmental systems are siloed, but an integrated patient record view is essential for patient safety in hospitals. XDS also has the potential for creating paperless clinical records by indexing both documents and images from all specialties, and XDS can bring about the required integration in a vendor neutral way.”
“Doncaster and Bassetlaw Trust has been a Fujifilm Synapse® PACS user since 2013. We have built a great relationship with the team during this time as we’ve developed various elements of our integrated image and document system. Fujifilm have worked with us on the development of their XDS consumer and have tailored it to the needs of a modern NHS Trust. By re-engineering their XDS consumer whilst keeping their clinical users in mind Fujifilm have set the bar very high for the XDS consumer market.
“At Doncaster we are storing DICOM radiology images, PDF reports and PDF scanned requests in the VNA. We are also looking at converting other specialty documents and images (e.g audiograms and ECGs that are currently printed and filed into our integrated paper record) to see if we can include them into the XDS based VNA too. This will allow departments to be gradually weaned off paper, thus moving to properly indexed digital patient record.”
The Fujifilm project team deployed Doncaster’s XDS consumer to deliver a range of customer-led key features in the latest version of Synapse® 5 PACS. These features included NHS number search and display, support of PIX and PDQ queries, XDS metadata display, filter and sort, streamlining of click rate to improve workflow and redesigning the XDS consumer to inlcude a document heirarchy. Kevin Shah, Head of Enterprise New Business at Fujifilm Europe commented “This project demonstrates our ongoing engagement and commitment to listening to and working with our customers to develop the functionality they need to improve outcomes for patients.”
