Cross charging for PACs in nhs

Open Forum
1

Hi all,

Does anyone know about cross charging for PACs and have experience of how this can be done within the nhs. At my site radiology owns our PACs system but there are 4 departments that use our storage that we would like to cross charge for I have average MB used within the last year but can’t get a quote for how much storage costs.

Thanks

2

Hi, Who owns your storage? You should be able to get a quote for storage costs probably in a cost per Tb depending upon your storage solution.

I am wanting to implement this to enable us to recover costs across our trust as ours is also used by multiple service areas.

3

Hi, obviously I have no idea of your internal organisation, but I would have thought you share the PACS IT system, not just its storage. Those departments that store images, would also review the same studies, using the PACS application. If you want to share the cost, would it not be simpler to divide the service charges or running costs (if you own it) by activity of each department?
We have services run in our hospital by another Trust, but do not cross charge as their storage requirement is very small compared to our overall requirement.

4

Hi Jess,

If it is due to budget codes the way I have seen this calculated in a couple of Trusts is broadly by looking at the following:

1 - Storage (simple - Tb used)
2 - Service (support and training etc. plus VR licenses etc., based on a piece-by-piece or percentage workload compared to Radiology’s overall use)
3 - Features (any extra functionality / interfaces required by the tertiary department which had to be added).

Cross-charging is usually seen between Medical Photography and Radiology or where there are separate Echo departments, or if Cardiology has crept onto using the main PACS for some reason. The largest proportion of use though would be for Research purposes, where the study leads fund temporarily their portion of use, plus additional IEP costs etc. from the grants received. Those issuing the grants tend to require ‘proof’ of the costs so the calculations above might help get some concrete numbers down.

To calculate storage costs, it is pretty much based on a percentage of what Radiology pay (I haven’t personally yet come across anything more complex than this, but there are always exceptions / innovators!).

Hope this helps;
Al.