Kyle Lawton, CEO, peerVue
PeerVue, headquartered in Sarasota, Fla, delivers intelligent solutions that solve critical workflow and communication gaps in health care worldwide. Sectra’s groundbreaking NIPACS nationwide medical image management and communication project in Northern Ireland will utilize peerVue’s innovative QICS (Qualitative Intelligence and Communications System) to provide comprehensive teaching file capabilities.
The NIPACS solution in Northern Ireland is a project of the Department of Health, Social Services and Public Safety (DHSSPS) and is one of the world’s largest RIS/PACS projects, with 26 hospitals currently connected to the Sectra system, and additional installations planned. A single common Sectra PACS and RIS platform throughout all public medical facilities makes a patient’s full radiology history immediately available whenever needed at the point of care in any medical facility in Northern Ireland.
The tight integration of QICS with Sectra’s RIS/PACS technology is key in delivering an efficient, user-friendly teaching file system. peerVue’s QICS will seamlessly allow users to author and publish cases from the NIPACS archive to system-wide teaching file worklists, enabling physicians to share and learn from important radiology cases nationwide. “We can take in radiology information automatically from them and provide access to the QICS tools directly from the Sectra PACS,” said Kyle Lawton, peerVue CEO. “In a keystroke, they can launch the QICS teaching file space to be able to extract images; capture relevant information about a finding, pathology, or study; and then right there be able to publish that to a secure, anonymous teaching file inventory.” This teaching file capability will enable users to access images from any location, remove all patient data for patient privacy, annotate images, categorize files and mark them with custom fields, and publish files in either jpeg or DICOM formats. “That’s a major differentiator of our system. It’s the ability to literally create a teaching file with whatever kind of options they want in whatever kind of layout they want. So whenever a case is created, it would be created within the framework that they have decided is best for their organization.”
“Another reason for selecting us, and a real differentiator, is the ability for the QICS platform to provide value for the customer as their needs evolve and eventually change. In the initial phase of the project, the focus is to be able to use the teaching files. But as regulatory requirements change, and they have new workflow demands or they bring on a new site and will want to be able to easily exchange information with that site, they will be able to extend and expand what capabilities QICS provides to them,” said Lawton.
QICS is a platform application designed specifically to be highly configurable to fill in a lot of the communication gaps seen between departments today. “What we are seeing in the industry is that RICS/PACS and traditional systems like those do a really good job at facilitating the area within the patient and exam life cycle that they were designed to address, such as scheduling and now image trends. But with a more sophisticated user environment and more pressures for demonstrating user quality, having more real-time communication between users, departments, and physicians is critical,” said Lawton. “That’s really what QICS has done. It has provided a platform that integrates the information systems and imaging systems to provide a layer of workflow capabilities that can deliver results between departments, connect users, and share and exchange information.”
Sectra is one of the world leaders for handling digital radiology images, with more than 1,000 hospitals worldwide using their systems daily. “We are very thrilled with the partnership that we have with Sectra. Sectra offers one of the leading PACS. It’s a very solid platform,” said Lawton. “With QICS, they have a flexible platform application that allows them to do [many] other things aside from teaching files. They have a lot of freedom to leverage a system that they have already purchased rather than going out and buying a separate peer review system, and so on. They have a platform that will be able to expand to address those other areas as they move forward.”
