GE Healthcare and the Hampshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (HHFT) in the UK have signed a 10-year partnership agreement to transform radiology services and improve patient care. This partnership includes a Radiology Managed Service (RMS) covering 120 pieces of radiology equipment, a command center, and an Oncology Cockpit to speed up cancer diagnosis.
Through the RMS agreement, GE Healthcare will manage the installation and maintenance services of radiology equipment including MR, CT and ultrasound. This will enable access to new technology throughout the agreement, supporting staff to transform the radiology services offered at Basingstoke & North Hampshire Hospital and the Royal Hampshire County Hospital in Winchester.
As part of HHFT’s broader program to improve speed to diagnosis for patients with suspected cancer, the agreement also includes an Oncology Cockpit and a command center. The Cockpit will map diagnostic demand and capacity constraints, helping staff to identify potential delays in the cancer pathway, simplify patient workflow, reduce waste, and ultimately improve speed to diagnosis for patients with suspected cancer. The command center will use advanced analytics to give staff a near real-time system and patient overview, in areas such as radiology, outpatient and inpatient care. Hospitals using command center solutions around the world have reported for example, reduced length of patient stay, increased efficiency, and improved staff satisfaction.
GE Healthcare also aims to deliver improved clinical, operational, and financial outcomes by extracting and integrating data from scanners and Radiological Information Systems (RIS) to allow visual management of the imaging pathway from referral to report. In this way, it will optimize the capacity and performance of every piece of equipment, as well as the system as a whole, streamlining the patient pathway and helping HHFT’s radiology teams deliver even better outcomes for the 600,000 people the Trust serves.
The agreement extends and enhances the relationship between GE Healthcare and HHFT, following GE’s provision of ventilators and monitoring support to expand Emergency Department capacity in Hampshire at the height of the COVID-19 surge.
