Problem

Northumbria Healthcare NHS Trust had less than a year to get a new PACS in place and organise the necessary business case, procurement and implementation. As well as putting in place a new system that could meet staff demands, the trust wanted to avoid a costly contract extension with the current supplier.

Approach

Ethical were appointed in July to develop Outline and Full Business Cases, trust imaging strategy, specification and tender documentation pack.  We also assisted with commercial negotiations and trust-side implementation project management, supplier and technical assurance.

With our support, a preferred bidder was chosen before Christmas. Despite initial time slippage from the new supplier, contract extension costs were avoided through shrewd commercial negotiations. As a result of Ethical’s involvement, the system went live in September – only 14 months after the initial engagement.

Impact

Ethical worked closely with Northumbria to help deliver its new strategic enterprise imaging platform within a rapid timeframe. The project helped improve the credibility of IT within the organisation, and the go-live of the system was recognised by the trust CEO as the best she had ever experienced.

Our support for commercial negotiations and technical assurance of Northumbria’s new supplier resulted in savings and avoided costs of £855k. This included:

  • The Trust receiving a significantly upgraded PACS system featuring enterprise storage, viewing and reporting, whilst at the same time saving £200k compared to previous costs
  • Reductions in contract extension costs of £380k
  • Avoided costs of £175k through payment holidays resulting from supplier delays
  • Avoided capital costs of £50k in storing Cardiology PACS images on the VNA instead of investing in new storage
  • Avoided capital costs of £50k by deploying Cardiology PACS servers on the Enterprise Imaging VMware platform instead of investing in physical servers/licenses
Ethical's service was second to none. Their support in helping us move from a challenging procurement position to one of the most successful PACS go-lives our Executive team has seen in such short timescales was invaluable. We couldn’t have done this without them. Birju Bartoli | Executive Director (with responsibility for IT)