Signify Premium Insight: Sectra’s Greater Manchester Deal – A Milestone Towards Imaging IT Market Leadership?

Written by Alan Stoddart & Steve Holloway: Eight NHS hospital trusts across Greater Manchester, UK, have signed a deal with Sectra, with the Swedish company set to provide the region with a new PACS solution as well as a vendor neutral archive for storing images that will replace legacy systems across the region’s hospitals. The deal in Greater Manchester is one of the highest profile in the UK in recent years, following on from other major regional imaging IT deals that have been implemented over the last decade. 

Following a multi-year integration effort, the system will in principle allow clinicians at the point of care to access diagnostic images through the electronic patient record system of each hospital site, facilitated by a regional integrated digital care record, covering a population of 3.2 million people living in the Greater Manchester area.  

The deal, one of the largest imaging IT deals in Europe this year, will see the system used to manage up to four million examinations annually. The new platform will be deployed at Greater Manchester’s eight hospital trusts in different stages, with the first going live in 2020. The system is also intended long-term to act as a foundation for a broader enterprise imaging strategy, consolidating images from many disciplines, such as nuclear medicine, orthopaedics and medical photography, as well as those from specialisms including endoscopy, cardiology and pathology.