Kettering General Hospital has deployed network acceleration
technology from
Blue Coat to enable it to send large X-ray images
electronically between sites using the
NHS Picture Archiving and Communications System (Pacs).
The Trust has used ProxySG wide area network optimisation
appliance from Blue Coat to decrease the time taken to load Pacs
images, such as CT scans and X-Rays, from minutes to second. X-ray
images, which would have previously taken a day to turn-around, can
now be accessed instantly,
Pacs images are large files. A complete CT scan can contain
upwards of 1000 images and clinical staff need to search through
all the images, almost 30 Gbytes of information. "Transporting such
images requires a large network," said Raza Tahir, head of ICT for
the Kettering General Hospital NHS Trust. Moving the high-quality
images within the main site was fine thanks to its 100Mbps network,
but Kettering's clinical staff needed to share the information with
Rushden Hospital, some 12miles from the main Kettering campus.
But Rushden Hospital suffered poor performance, as it only had a
2Mbps network link, making Pacs unusable. Each image was taking
upwards of a minute to load.
Kettering needed to print out the x-rays and send them between
sites using a courier company, to overcome the poor performance
issues it was experiencing. MRI scans and X-rays that took place at
Kettering Hospital were printed onto film and delivered daily to
the regional clinics, costing in the region of £200 per clinic
request. In addition, medical staff needed to provide 24 hours
notice.
The Trust installed a pair of Blue Coat ProxySG devices to
provide Wan optimisation technologies which have decreased the time
taken to load a single large image such as a chest X-ray from
around a minute to approximately 5-10 seconds.