As a 20-year radiologist in the United States, I admire the NHS’ mission of preserving publicly-funded healthcare, better meeting patients on a community level, and providing the national leadership this initiative requires. But if there’s one element of American healthcare that I think would benefit UK providers and the success of the NHS 10-Year Plan, it’s PACS freedom: the ability to deploy whichever RIS or PACS best fits your needs, rather than force your needs into a one-size-fits-all deployment.
The UK has relatively few options for PACS vendors. This crisis of competition has forced providers to buy PACS from the same few vendors. This may work fine for some, but those who may be frustrated with user experience, cost, implementation, or customer support have few alternatives. When you have a monopoly, there’s little incentive for the vendors doing the monopolizing to change things. Consequently, what these PACS have to offer may drift further away from what providers need.
To maximize the benefits of PACS in making clinical workflows more reliable, reducing technical complexity, and enhancing patient care, providers need PACS freedom. That means the freedom to switch to the best RIS or PACS for your needs, when you want, and it means freedom from being stuck to one vendor for everything.
That starts with finding a partner who can provide a truly vendor neutral archive. More than just a passive archive that stores images, a mature, modern VNA orchestrates data from across the enterprise, regardless of department or data type. It eliminates silos, scales with your organization, and onboards all ‘ologies into a single, central source of truth that care teams can easily access. It gives providers long-term control of their data, their imaging solutions architecture, and their future. PACS freedom also ensures resilience, optionality, and the ability to evolve workflows and the solutions that manage them as clinical, operational, and financial considerations also evolve.
Having this freedom and flexibility depends on a partner with the record, expertise, and portfolio adaptability of providing resilience, scalability, and interoperability tailored to your organization’s growth – rather than tailoring your organization to the vendor.
A healthier imaging ecosystem in the UK depends on competition. That means introducing meaningful choices into a market that has been constrained for too long. With image volumes exploding beyond what radiologists can realistically handle themselves, providers all being locked into the same PACS sends a shiver down my spine.
The NHS 10-Year Plan is an ambitious and inspiring project for revolutionizing healthcare in the UK. But it can only really succeed if providers, trusts, and doctors feel like they’re being supported by a technology safety net of PACS, RIS, VNA, and other imaging solutions that are modular and scalable for their needs – and can be expanded on, or replaced, at the provider’s discretion. Competition, not monopolies, with a freedom of PACS choices for providers is how to get there.