In November last year, the UK’s Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) revealed that over the next 12 months, £248m of recently announced departmental funding will be spent improving digital connectivity across diagnostic services, with a major focus on imaging.

The announcement was welcomed warmly by a sector long squeezed by conflicting pressures. Advances in clinical practice and technology have created growing demand for imaging across a range of specialities, meanwhile radiologists are already struggling with increased workloads to clear post-pandemic backlogs. Compounding the pressure is a global shortage of radiologists, with The Clinical Radiology UK Workforce Census 2020 indicating a 44 percent shortfall in the clinical radiology workforce by 2025.

There’s no doubt that improving digital connectivity is an essential step forward in supporting remote reporting capacity, but it is only a part of the solution. As Dr Jeanette Dickson, President of The Royal College of Radiologists, says, “Better IT connectivity will be crucial to the success and roll out of imaging networks and community diagnostic centres and will undoubtedly help teams work smarter, and — where possible — work through backlogs faster by supporting out-of-hours reporting and access to a specialist opinion. However, funding … and improved IT connectivity alone will not solve the radiology workforce shortfall.”

What’s needed is a fundamental rethink in the way radiology services are provided, to enable hospitals and trusts to pool and share talent, knowledge and resources — not only within their local vicinity, but across a global network. But to do that, hospitals and healthcare providers need a solution that does not rely solely on costly single-use, single-user radiology workstations. And they need a solution that ensures strict adherence to data security and healthcare regulations, allowing access to patient data without that data leaving the healthcare provider’s infrastructure.

In 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, The Royal Cornwall Hospital NHS Trust approached Citrix to create a viable home-reporting solution for its 30 radiologists and radiographers. As a long-time Citrix customer, the trust’s employees already used Citrix to access information and applications on trust-owned or personal devices — but the model fell short of the requirements for radiologists, who needed high-definition image resolution, alongside speed and connectivity.

With help from Citrix, the team piloted a full deployment of Windows-based desktop as a service (DaaS) workloads. These virtual desktops leverage Citrix HDX (high-definition experience) technology with NVIDIA powered servers to deliver diagnostic-quality images in a “like-local” experience to radiologists and radiographers at home.

Now, equipped with a solution that allows the trust to offer part-time, home-based and out-of-hours working to radiologists, it has dramatically increased its capacity to provide more flexible, more responsive radiology services to its own patient community and beyond.

This ability to securely and robustly connect radiology systems and services could hold the key to overcoming global shortages of both imaging equipment and workforce. A recent article in The Lancet highlighted the lack of imaging access in low- and middle-income countries (LMICS), citing funding and equipment costs as the major barriers, and lauding teleradiology as a critical solution. “Current imaging technology developments largely focus on digitalisation with standards for image archiving and transmission that allow sharing and mining of images and reports, including teleradiology interpretation services. This offers the possibility to develop networks as a pillar of imaging organisation in LMICS. In addition, teleradiology may be used to develop comprehensive imaging systems based on network solutions between the different levels of care, which will contribute to compensate for workforce shortages.”

Remote radiology has been long held back by financial, technological and regulatory barriers. We’re proud to be building the bridges that can connect patients, communities and even countries to potentially life-saving imaging services.

To hear more about our work with Royal Cornwall Hospital NHS Trust, watch our webinar on demand.