NW consortium picks Carestream PACS

The Cheshire and Merseyside Consortium, which covers 11 trusts, has chosen Carestream to supply its picture archiving and communications system.

Carestream has been awarded ‘preferred bidder status’ for the contract, which the original tender estimated to be worth between £5m and 10m.

In conjunction with Informatics Merseyside, the consortium issued the tender last November for a replacement PACS, radiology information system and vendor neutral archive.

EHealth Insider reported last month that the consortium had awarded the RIS element of the contract to HSS.

Most of the trusts involved in the procurement have GE Healthcare PACS provided under the local service provider agreement with CSC that was put in place as part of the National Programme for IT in the NHS.

The Informatics Merseyside PACS and RIS replacement programme team was tasked with procuring new systems ahead of the end of the national contract on 30 June 2013.

PACS was listed as ‘lot one’ in the tender, with the trusts involved in the consortium looking for a managed service.

Subject to the successful conclusion of contracts, there will be eleven individual PACS agreements with each of the participating trusts for five years, with the option to extend for a further five.

Between them, the consortium members operate fifteen sites and perform around 1.35m radiology examinations each year.

Carestream has said that the PACS replacements will start to be installed in early 2013.

Charlie McCaffrey, managing director of Carestream UK, said: “We have a great reputation for service in the North West of England and this is our chance to extend the high quality support that our customers expect to this PACS implementation.”

The win is an important one for Carestream, which did not win National PACS Programme business.

According to the EHI Intelligence NHS Trust Database, the company has three PACS installations at trusts in England.

However, it is responsible for providing PACS to the Spire Healthcare group and to most hospitals in Scotland. HSS is the dominant provider of RISs to the NHS in England.

The 11 trusts in the consortium are: Aintree University Hospitals, Alder Hey Children’s, Clatterbridge Centre for Oncology, Liverpool Community Health, Liverpool Heart and Chest Hospital, Liverpool Women’s, Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University Hospitals, Southport and Ormskirk Hospital, St Helens and Knowsley Teaching Hospitals, Walton Centre, and Warrington and Halton Hospitals.