Vacanices for self-driven passionate people to join our team

Founded in 2001, Pukka-j is a UK, specialist medical technology company offering smart software solutions for imaging and reporting in healthcare. We have vacancies for self-driven and passionate people to join our team. 

Application Specialist

The successful applicant will have experiences of working in the healthcare sector and medical imaging and devices.  Experience of technical support, systems training technical writing is expected. Knowledge of DICOM, HL7 and the relevant technologies would be an advantage.

Software Developer

The successful application will have strong software application development skills with a relevant degree qualification. Experience with Java and HTML5 together with database experience is required.  An interest in working in medical imaging within the healthcare sector is essential.

If you are interested, please send your CV to louise@pukka-j.com or tel:  01380 860044

For further info, please visit www.pukka-j.com

Community Healthcare benefits from Pukka-j’s unique Case Management System

In recent months, Pukka-j has been working closely with ultrasound providers to deliver an integrated pathway for prompt diagnosis and a seamless patient journey across the healthcare system.  Ultrasound provision is a service that falls within the ‘Any Qualified Provider’ (AQP)* scheme within community-based services.  It gives patients the choice about the location of a scan and reduces the time between referral and outcome, thus ensuring patients receive the correct diagnostic test in a timely manner and in the most clinically appropriate setting.

Achieving these high standards can present a challenge for providers and identifying this need, Pukka-j has developed a unique Case Management System (CMS) that helps providers deliver their services more efficiently.   The Case Management System uses the latest innovative RIS PACS technology to manage patient records, scheduling, and text message appointment reminders, allowing reporters to complete and share results with the health community, all of which assists the provider in the provision of a first class experience for the patient.    In the case of RIS, Pukka-j can assist providers in realising the full potential of medical informatics in ways that work for them.   Easy to interface into a new or existing department, it helps optimise workflow and securely manage patient information throughout the facility. 

One of the challenges Pukka-j faced was to tailor the workflow to fit with the provider’s rota of ultrasound clinic locations, many of which lacked the communications needed to run web-based services.   The Pukka-j ‘Return to Base’ model enables a Health Care Assistant (HCA) to utilise an encrypted laptop to synchronise data to and from the provider’s central RIS PACS, over a dedicated broadband running a Virtual Private Network (VPN).   From a HCA’s home, appointments and exam orders are downloaded to the laptop, which then accompanies the portable ultrasound scanner to the different clinic locations.  At the clinic, the laptop connects to the portable ultrasound scanner populating it with a worklist, allowing the acquisition of images on the scanner without the need for manual entry of patient, and order details. Once acquired, images are transferred from the scanner to the laptop and the sonographer completes the report.  At the end of each clinic session, the HCA takes the laptop home to upload images and report to the central RIS PACS system, which, in turn, downloads a worklist to the laptop, allowing orders to be accessible for the following clinic session. 

Louise Crossley, Business Development, Pukka-j comments …”Pukka-j’s product has evolved over 12 years of continual development and we pride ourselves on high levels of customer satisfaction.  From deployment support through to patient case management, our team is focused entirely on making sure providers get the support they need.  Our customisable workflows enable us to build a system that reflects individual requirements and which is also adaptable to current needs and future growth, regardless of how many diagnostic services and sites providers wish to run.”

An additional CMS module includes Key Performance Indicator (KPI) reports, enabling providers to make decisions on immediate response to the demand and capacity of their services.  KPI reports fulfil providers’ contractual obligations to allow them to present their outcomes to healthcare commissioners.  The Pukka-j solution fully complies with the Information Standards Board (ISB).

Pukka-j Donates PACS Equipment to Hospital Project In Pakistan

Pukka-j has recently donated a PACS loaded server and software for installation in a MDAUK hospital in North Kashmir, Pakistan (Midland Doctors Association UK).

Pukka-j made the donation through Tanweer Arif of Care UK.   Care UK has been a customer of Pukka-j for many years, with Tanweer being responsible for RIS/PACS and system interfacing products across the whole UK organisation.  Commenting, Tanweer says, “Pukka-j is the preferred RIS/PACS supplier for Care UK and delivers a first class product and support for our company.   I thought that the MDAUK hospital should be equipped with the same product we offer for diagnostic services at Care UK and I therefore approached Pukka-j for the donation.”  Tanweer and his family, through arranging the donation, have provided a strong IT base for the MDAUK hospital, with Tanweer giving up his spare time to set up the system in Pakistan.    Without a robust IT and communication to handle medical data, the hospital infrastructure would lack organisation and process.   The server and equipment will be installed shortly on-site at the near-complete hospital, ready for the forthcoming inauguration later in the spring.

 The Pukka-j PACS will be used initially for radiology, CR, DR and US, and it is anticipated that it will be expanded to other systems later on.   

 MDAUK was initially created to serve a simple purpose: the construction and running of a charitable national medical institution in the earthquake-hit region of Pakistan in order to provide free healthcare at the point of delivery and serve as a major training centre for local health care professionals as well as acting as a focal point for any future relief operations should other natural disasters occur again.

 The catastrophic earthquake measuring 7.6 on the Richter scale struck Northern Pakistan on 8th October 2005.   A trauma team from Nottingham and Derby flew into the region one week after the tragedy and worked in a field hospital consisting mainly of tents.   Over one thousand patients were treated in the five and a half days the team was there, with 134 major surgical procedures being carried out under general anaesthetic.   At any one time, 70 inpatients were being treated.

 The trauma team returned and made a long-term commitment to help the people affected by the earthquake.   This escalated to into the development of a health infrastructure.   The team initially consisted of doctors from the Midlands, but as the scale of the needs became apparent, a range of professional disciplines spanning both the private and public sectors became involved.   

For further information on the MDAUK project go to www.mdauk.co.uk/projects

Pukka-j’s Enterprise Anonymisation Service at St James’s University Hospital, Leeds

Pukka-j recently installed its Enterprise Anonymisation service at St. James’s University Hospital, Leeds. St. James’s, affectionately known as “Jimmy’s”, is internationally famous as Europe’s largest teaching hospital. The new software was supplied to St. James’s Institute of Oncology. Housed in the purpose-built, state-of-the-art Bexley Wing, the Institute provides a world-class service to cancer patients from across the local area and beyond. 

 It is important for teaching and research establishments that images for clinical trials are de-identified and exported to another system, outside the institution’s security network. In addition, before data from research can be shared with other researchers or archived, it may be necessary to anonymise it so that individuals, organisations, or businesses cannot be identified.  

 As part of its extensive portfolio of products for healthcare imaging and reporting, Pukka-j offers an anonymiser designed to be used either as a stand-alone anonymised research store, or as a portal through which data is passed to be anonymised and forwarded to dedicated research stores, at the same time, keeping a log of the anonymised record. It is applied to all DICOM files arriving on the server, or HL7 messages containing a patient details section.

 Together with the anonymisation function is the ‘pseudonymisation’ process, where the true identifier, such as name or patient ID number is replaced by a pseudonym that is unique to the individual concerned, but bears no relation to the person ‘in the real world’. The pseudonym, therefore, cannot be used as a means of identification. This is because in the ‘pseudonymisation’, the information that reveals who the pseudonym relates to, will be held securely and separately from the data being processed. Used along with the original patient ID, the new anonymous patient details can be tracked via a database table on the server. In the case of the St. James’s project, the Pukka-j software meets all the criteria and handles the pseudonymisation procedure with ease.

 Dr. Isobel Bond, Trainee Clinical Scientist at St. James’s Institute of Oncology, says, The service is being developed to be used in radiotherapy, MR and nuclear medicine at St. James’s to prepare data for clinical trials and teaching purposes. Anonymisation of the many different types of data we use is an extremely complex task. The Pukka-j system is flexible and will give us control over how the data is altered to best meet our requirements.”

 The software can be configured in general, or for a specific research trial, and will create anonymisation records automatically upon receiving data. It is independent of the order or nature of the data, and it is possible to pre-define an anonymisation record for trials where the patients and their required trial IDs are known.  

 Dez Wright, Technical Manager at Pukka-j comments, With the legal and ethical obligations in place for patient confidentiality, this is an area of vital importance to hospitals and research institutions. It can also pose problems for the software programmer. Pukka-j specialises in being able to customise and solve to the client’s satisfaction these types of delicate issues, often not tackled by the larger IT suppliers.”

Pukka-j’s PACS Localisation Solutions Prove Popular with North West NHS Trusts

250 million PACS images were recently migrated by Pukka-j on behalf of four NHS Trusts located in the North West of England.  The Pukka-j PACS migration solution was deployed at Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University Hospitals NHS Trust; St Helens and Knowsley NHS Trust; Aintree University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and the Liverpool Heart and Chest Hospital NHS Foundation Trust. 

Although the commissions from the North West Trusts were separate projects, the end goal proved to be the same.  The Trusts employed Pukka-j to localise PACS images from a local and central data store, provided by CSC, their existing PACS local service provider.

The trend in PACS localisation is a result of PACS local service provider contracts expiring in June 2013.  For those Trusts wishing to implement a replacement PACS with a new provider,  it is a sensible approach for all of the PACS data to be migrated from the existing system and held in one place to enable the Trust to be the data owner and controller, prior to a new PACS being implemented.

Kevin Wilson, Technical Director of Pukka-j comments:  “Every migration is unique however with the LSP solutions in place we were faced with the added complexity of data being flushed from the Trusts local PACS and residing in a remote Central Data Store. Our solutions coped well with the challenge, completing the projects within a timely fashion, whilst ensuring the migration process had no impact on the live PACS environment. Until an existing PACS is no longer in use by a Trust, Pukka-j performs a regular synchronisation process to guarantee recent images acquired and imported images with historic dates in PACS are continually localised to the Pukka-j environment.”    

The main advantage of Pukka-j PACS localisation solutions is the flexibility of the products, which allow migration to be scheduled out-of-hours, with options for storing data temporarily, or in a long term archive enabling data to be cleansed and migrated to a new PACS  or VNA supplier as and when required.

Pukka-j continues to support the North West Trusts with their roadmap for PACS replacement and as a result Pukka-j has received additional commissions for providing the Trusts with a mix of product, including VNA, technical consultation, bespoke software and integration services.

Pukka-j’s RIS PACS for Barlborough NHS Treatment Centre

Pukka-j’s RIS PACS for Barlborough NHS Treatment Centre. Barlborough NHS Treatment Centre is an Independent Sector Treatment Centre providing high quality orthopaedic care, serving Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, Lincolnshire and South Yorkshire. It is run by Care UK an independent company purely for NHS patients, and was originally part of the Government’s initiative to offer patients more choice and to reduce waiting lists.

Pukka-j consolidates their CT Archive for North West London Hospital’s NHS Trust

Pukka-j consolidates their CT Archive for North West London Hospital’s NHS Trust. Pukka-j amalgamated CT Archives at Northwick Park Hospital and Central Middlesex Hospitals to centralise the existing Pukka-j CT Archive service.  Available storage at the Central Middlesex was piggybacked onto the Northwick Park archive, increasing storage space for future storage, retrieval and review of CT studies.

Royal Liverpool University Hospital NHS Trust commissioned Pukka-j to localise PACS data

Royal Liverpool University Hospital NHS Trust commissioned Pukka-j to localise 87 million images. The Royal Liverpool University Hospital is the biggest and busiest hospital in Merseyside. It is part of the Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University Hospitals NHS Trust. It currently has over 40 wards, more than 750 beds and has the main accident and emergency department for the city of Liverpool, the largest of its kind in the country, capable of dealing with major trauma and life threatening illness.

A successful outcome for St Helens & Knowsley NHS Trust

A successful outcome for St Helens and Knowsly NHS Trust with the migration of 65 million images by Pukka-j. St Helens and Knowsley NHS Trust provide a full range of acute in-patient, out-patient, day case and emergency services to the local communities of St Helens, Knowsley, parts of Halton and Liverpool, extending to the whole of Cheshire, Merseyside, North Wales and the Isle of Man

 

Aintree University Hospitals NHS selects Pukka-j’s PACS Migration

Aintree University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust selects Pukka-j to handle migration of 43 million PACS images. Aintree University Hospital is located in the heart of North Mersyside in Fazakerley and provides high quality, patient-centred healthcare. Aintree is a large teaching hospital which provides Accident & Emergency services and a wide range of general and specialist services.