Approximately half of French hospitals still use film for their imaging exams. The Ministry of Health, through its state agency, has enlisted the Orange-GE Healthcare consortium to deliver digital cloud-based PACS to France’s most populous region, the Ile de France.

The “Region sans Film” – filmless region – project will combine multiple GE Healthcare products and cloud infrastructure by Orange to offer SaaS PACS, RIS and Archiving services to hospitals as well as image distribution to local GPs.

“This is an enormous breakthrough for the region,” said Bernard Algayres, General Manager of GE Healthcare IT eHealth, EMEA. “Faster diagnostic turnaround times and access to patient images by GPs are only the beginning. In future phases of this project, we’re going to build digital bridges across areas that now present great divides. It’s a very exciting initiative.”

The 30 connected hospitals participating in the first phase of the project will deploy GE Centricity PACS, with technical support included. This allows the hospitals to dedicate their IT staff to focus on users and other applications.

“We have been able to benefit from the service very quickly,” said Sylvie Blangy, chief radiologist, Hôspital Simone Veil. “We saw immediate increase in our global productivity and users have easily transitioned to the system.”

Institut Gustave Roussy Oncology Hospital benefits from a service including management of the infrastructure, monitoring, upgrades and migration with guaranteed availability. “We made an evaluation before subscribing to the archiving service, which demonstrated a real financial advantage compared to maintaining an archive in house. This even takes into account the migration costs of more than 800,000 studies from our legacy local archive,” explained Naima Mezaour, CIO of the hospital.