From the Pacific Northwest to the UK: how one regional US health system’s digital transformation success could be a blueprint for the NHS’ modernisation journey
A new study from the Royal College of Radiologists offers up the latest data point in a worrying trend: workforce shortages have become a major driver of England’s diagnostic imaging and cancer treatment backlog, with a 31% shortfall in clinical radiologists projected to grow to 41% in just five years. Fewer radiologists mean longer wait times for accurate diagnoses and delays in patient care. It also means more work and stress for a radiology workforce that is already overworked and overstressed as is.
As a practicing radiologist in the United States, it sounds eerily similar to exactly what’s playing out here. Fewer people, tighter money, funding cuts, hospital closures particularly in rural areas and underserved communities – both of our countries are facing many of the same headwinds, with similar negative impacts on both physicians and patients.
But it’s not all doom and gloom; in fact I can honestly say that there is hope on the horizon. The NHS’ ambitious 10 Year Health Plan to transform healthcare delivery across England and shift to a community-driven neighbourhood health service reminds me of a health system here in the states that recently embarked on a major enterprise imaging transformation to buoy overburdened clinics and hospitals in dire straits. While MultiCare Health System is just one provider in one area of the United States, and on its own is not entirely comparable to what the NHS faces for delivering healthcare across an entire nation, MultiCare’s story of building an imaging ecosystem for regional healthcare providers may just be the kind of success story to take some inspiration from in the years ahead – both for the NHS and in the US as well.
MultiCare and NHS: finding commonalities between two stories, 5,000 miles apart
MultiCare Health System is one of the oldest healthcare providers in Washington State. It’s also the largest community-based, locally governed health system in the area: spanning 14 hospitals, over 300 clinicals, and more than 22,000 employees. It includes major urban centers alongside rural communities with longstanding issues accessing critical healthcare services. These are communities being wracked by hospital closures, service cuts, and physician shortages across the board.
The Prime Minister’s 10 Year Health Plan for England lays out an eerily similar predicament for the NHS, which stands at a precipice wherein patients cannot get GP appointments; sit on hospital wait lists that are only getting longer; and face a risk of “yet worse access and outcomes”, as demographic changes, aging populations, and creaky digital infrastructure “heap yet more demand on an already stretched health service.” The 10-year plan acknowledges that healthcare service right now is in a critical condition, struggling with analogue systems that create workflow inefficiencies and limit collaboration between healthcare providers.
In both countries, broken and fragmented systems are creating barriers to efficient healthcare delivery for neglected patients and communities who need it most. But despite all the myriad differences between the U.S. healthcare system and the NHS, MultiCare’s success story of an entrepreneurial, tech-driven transformation not only mirrors the goals of the NHS’ modernisation plan – it could also help illustrate a way forward for how the NHS can utilise tech to meet the needs of those communities who need care most in a way that is most convenient to their situation.
Building a foundation for integrated care
MultiCare’s transformation strategy centred on implementing a comprehensive enterprise archive and a cloud-based PACS that could serve as the backbone for all imaging data across their system. This isn’t simply about upgrading technology – it’s about creating a unified digital ecosystem where patient data can flow seamlessly between departments, facilities, and care providers.
This approach is what allows MultiCare to provide cloud-based imaging services to smaller, rural providers in the region – enables those more distressed clinics and hospitals, that don’t have the same level of resources, to provide services like point-of-care ultrasound, oncology, and ophthalmology, and tailored them to individual practices’ needs. And more importantly, MultiCare provides these services to communities that wouldn’t normally have access to that level of care.
For NHS trusts embarking on their modernisation journey, MultiCare’s story offers a model for successful regional healthcare. The NHS plan’s vision for neighbourhood health centres operating 12 hours a day, six days a week, will require exactly this type of integrated digital foundation – not just to ensure that patient data is following the patient seamlessly across community and hospital settings, but that the care services are actually reaching the patients in need, instead of continuing to force them into endlessly long queues at hospitals far from where they live.
From fragmentation to integration
One of the most significant transformations MultiCare achieved was moving from siloed departmental systems to integrated multidisciplinary collaboration. Their VNA implementation enabled care teams across different floors, departments, and facilities to access comprehensive patient imaging data from a single source of truth. This eliminated the communication gaps that previously hindered care coordination and clinical decision-making.
The NHS 10 Year Health Plan envisions a strikingly similar transformation. The new neighbourhood health service model aims to bring together “multidisciplinary teams of doctors, nurses, pharmacists, social care workers, and community health professionals” delivering care under one roof. The plan’s emphasis on creating Single Patient Records viewable through the NHS App by 2028 directly parallels MultiCare’s success in centralising patient data access.
However, the NHS faces a more complex challenge: achieving this integration across thousands of trusts, hospitals, clinics and community providers nationwide. The key lesson from MultiCare’s implementation is that vendor-neutral architecture is essential for true interoperability. When healthcare organisations aren’t locked into proprietary systems, they can more easily integrate new technologies, adapt to changing clinical workflows, and collaborate with external partners—exactly what the NHS needs to achieve its ambitious community care goals.
An entrepreneurial approach to revitalise imaging and meet people closer to home
Whether you’re a clinician, IT administrator, or patient– in the UK or the States – it’s all too easy to feel glum about healthcare’s present and future state. Patient volumes and wait times are going up; the workforce of clinicians, radiologists, and care teams is dwindling; costs are tight; and hospitals, clinics, and providers, of all sizes and geographies, feel like they are constantly on a razor’s edge. It doesn’t have to be this way. And from my vantage point, there is a way forward.
MultiCare Health System is just one provider, in one region, in one country. It’s not a one-size-fits-all silver bullet to all the problems that all providers face on both sides of the Atlantic. But I do believe it is an example in action of what the NHS plan calls for in theory: an entrepreneurial, scalable approach to leveraging technology not only for alleviating the existential crunch facing so many healthcare providers today, but actually opening new, tailored channels of healthcare service and access to communities that for too long have been neglected. This is what the NHS is trying to do for the whole country; this is what MultiCare has been able to achieve in one corner of another country. At a time when funding is tight and success stories may be few and far between, the parallels between MultiCare’s story and the NHS’ ambitions provide a reason for optimism for both countries.
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