GE Healthcare has agreed to supply Hampshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (HHFT) in the U.K. with equipment for the next 10 years to enhance the quality of its radiology services and patient care.

The company will provide radiology managed service (RMS) for 120 pieces of equipment, a command center and an oncology cockpit to speed up cancer diagnosis. It will oversee the installation and maintenance of radiology equipment including MR, CT and ultrasound.

The deal applies to all hospitals under HHFT, including Andover War Memorial Hospital, Basingstoke and North Hampshire Hospital, and Royal Hampshire County Hospital in Winchester. Together, they serve 600,000 people, according to the Andover Advertiser.

“Our vision is to provide outstanding care for every patient. To do that we need to bring innovation and investment into our hospitals and our clinical teams. “This partnership will not only give us access to advanced radiology equipment, but it will also enable faster, more accurate diagnosis and reduce waiting times for patients,” Alex Whitfield, chief executive of the Hampshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, said in a statement.

HHFT expects the partnership to aid in its objective to find and deliver faster diagnoses to patients. The healthcare system will use GE’s oncology cockpit to keep track of diagnostic demand and capacity constraints and to help staff avoid potential delays in cancer care. It also will use it to simplify patient workflow, reduce waste and enable faster diagnoses.

The command center’s advanced analytics will allow HHFT to operate in near real-time and will help clinicians manage patients in radiology, outpatient and inpatient care. Other hospitals worldwide with the solution say that it has helped decrease length of stays for patients, increased efficiency and improved staff satisfaction.

Additionally, GE will extract and integrate data from scanners and radiological information systems to create visuals of the imaging pathway from referral to report. This will help the hospitals better manage their clinical, operational and financial outcomes, as well as optimize the capacity and performance of every piece of equipment and the system as a whole. The result will be a streamlined patient pathway, with HHFT’s radiologists able to provide better outcomes to patients.

“As we recover from the pandemic, the next few years will be challenging for everyone in the NHS, but HHFT has chosen to invest in a long-term, innovative approach to optimizing capacity and empowering its outstanding radiology teams,” said Simon McGuire, general manager of GE Healthcare Northern Europe. “We’ll be with them every step of the way and are thrilled to be working with the Trust.”

The company also announced on April 8 that it had completed construction of a new interventional radiology suite at Oak Valley Health in Canada. The suite is the first in the country to be fitted with a GE Healthcare Allia IGS 7 system, which allows interventional radiologists to diagnose and treat complex and intricate cases using minimally invasive procedures.

It also is offering RT imaging, simulation and guidance products from its CT, MR, PET/CT and ultrasound businesses as part of a joint effort with Elekta, which will cover the treatment side, to make radiotherapy care more precise.

"Partnering with Elekta enables us to better serve health systems and cancer centers, who are seeking to better control their own cost base and build cancer care pathways with best-of-breed solutions from different vendors that are interoperable within the clinical workflow — and with a less cumbersome purchasing process," Ben Newton, head of oncology solutions at GE Healthcare, told HCB News at the time.