Pukka-J provides NHS Highland with a storage and connectivity solution for its large and sparsely populated territory.

Pukka-j recently installed a Radiotherapy Image Archive System at Raigmore Hospital, Inverness, to provide a flexible storage and connectivity solution to the Department of Clinical Oncology.   The hospital, part of the NHS Highland, is one of the three specialist Cancer Centres within the North of Scotland Cancer network.

The Pukka-j Radiotherapy Image Archive is a complete data management solution, which is highly interoperable in design, to integrate, seamlessly, with all other DICOM and HL7 standard compliant systems.   It provides a robust data repository for DICOM RT, DICOM and non-DICOM file formats with all short-term and long-term data remaining on-line.  All data resides on a primary archive, with a copy of the data being automatically forwarded to a secondary archive to provide an on-line backup for disaster recovery.   The system is highly adaptable and user-configurable, whereby a flexible rule-based data management is applied to automate an Oncology Department’s imaging workflow.  

Ian Beange, Principal Medical Physicist (Computing & Quality Systems), Radiotherapy Physics, Cancer Services at Raigmore Hospital says,

We identified a requirement for a DICOM archive to handle our forthcoming increase in CT data.   During our examination of what was out there in the market, we came to the conclusion that the Pukka-j Radiotherapy Archive was extremely flexible in how we could make use of it and suited our workflow pattern, and so it became one of the products of choice.   The installation went extremely smoothly and we’ve been very happy with the help and advice offered by the Pukka-j team.

The Department of Clinical Oncology at Raigmore Hospital provides non-surgical cancer services – mainly radiotherapy and chemotherapy – to the population of the Highland region, Western Isles and parts of West Grampian.   The department has an inpatient facility and works closely with oncology staff in outlying areas.

As the largest and most sparsely populated part of the UK, with a mountainous terrain, rugged coastline and populated islands, the area covered by NHS Highland covers 32,512 km2 (12,507 square miles), which represents approximately 41 percent of the landmass of Scotland.   This area of outstanding landscapes and natural features also presents a number of major challenges for the delivery of health services, being a difficult and mountainous terrain, with rugged coastlines, populated islands, limited internal transport and also limited communications infrastructure.   NHS Highland leads the way in meeting the challenge of providing efficient and effective health care services to this remote and rural region.

Pukka-j is a customer-focused company providing development and deployment of IT products and services to the healthcare sector.   The company specialises in configuring its systems to the way that the NHS and independent providers need them to work; services can also be web-integrated where needed.