The 10 projects at the heart of NHS IT

Picture Archiving and Communications System (Pacs)

Pacs allows images such as X-rays and scans to be stored digitally, and all but removes traditional film from the process.

Find out more about the 10 key NHS IT projects

♦  NHS Care Records Service

♦  Choose and Book

♦  The Electronic Prescription Service

♦  N3 national broadband network

♦  Picture Archiving and Communications System (Pacs)

♦  The Spine

♦  The Quality Management and Analysis System

♦  GP2GP record transfer

♦  NHSmail- a central email and directory service for the NHS

♦  Secondary Uses Service

As a result health professionals can access images on laptops or tablet PCs, speeding up the delivery of information - and cutting the costs associated with film processing and storage.

Pacs is being delivered throughout England within five regions or "clusters", each working with a single local service provider (LSP).

What progress so far?

To date, more than 473 million images have been stored so far using Pacs supplied as part of NpfIT.

Pacs has been fully deployed to all acute hospitals since December 2007 and the focus is now concentrated on image sharing between locations.

A system to allow Pacs files between 20MB and 1GB to be transferred between locations will be in place by January next year while any smaller files can be transferred via the health service's email system, NHSmail.

CfH is also working with security vendor McAfee and Pacs suppliers to enable encrypted CDs to be burned from the system.