By Steve Ranger, 11 October 2005 12:20
Remote access to central databases is allowing health staff in the east of England to reach more patients faster.
The Suffolk West Primary Care Trust Diabetic Eye Screening Service (Dess) screens patients to see if changes are occurring to their eyes as a result of diabetes affecting the retina, providing essential information for doctors.
Images of patients' retinas are stored on the screener's laptop. And until April this year, screeners would have to return to the central hospital to upload these into the database.
The service covers a minimum of 12,000 patients - which means the team has to cover Cambridgeshire, Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk.
The secure remote access service from Cable & Wireless used in the eye screening scheme means that the Dess can maximise the time spent caring for patients and minimise the cost of the screening service.
Richard Dewhirst, senior manger at the Dess, told silicon.com: "Our scanning sites are further and further from the central site. We now cover an area from just north of the Thames to The Wash - it's a broad band across East Anglia.
"The journey time it takes to get back to base means that we would have to cut clinics short. We looked for an alternative solution and we needed to find some means of synching the data remotely."
He said the service had looked at synching through mobile phones but that was expensive. Dewhirst said: "The data coming across is images that are 640KB and there's four images per person.
"If we see 35 patients that's 180 to 240 images that have to come across and if that was done over the mobile phone that would be very expensive."
Satellite wasn't an option for similar reasons.
Dess is now using Cable & Wireless' NHS Secure Remote Access service, which effectively extends the national NHS network - NHSnet - out to authorised remote users.
It uses a virtual private network (VPN) accessed via a token-based strong authentication service to allow screeners to download the images to the central server over a home broadband connection, which saves staff from returning to the hospital at the end of the day.
Dewhirst said: "It takes about an hour to download 35 patients' images. But that time isn't dead time - screeners can do it overnight and it doesn't affect their normal work. We give them broadband at home if they don't have it already but many people have got it."
Saving time means more patients can be screened. He said: "We can see more patients. The cost savings are astronomical in terms of petrol and screeners' time. Because we can see more patients our service becomes more efficient."
Dewhirst said he was also considering extending the use of the VPN further so that eye specialists can look at the retina images from home.
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