Improving efficiencies at Princess Alexandra Hospital with Philips Incisive CT

The Princess Alexandra Hospital NHS Trust provides a full range of general acute, outpatient and diagnostic services at The Princess Alexandra Hospital in Harlow, the Herts and Essex Hospital in Bishop’s Stortford, and St Margaret’s Hospital in Epping. The Trust employs more than 4,000 staff and serves a local population of around 350,000 people living in west Essex and east.

Philips and The Princess Alexandra Hospital have been working together for over two decades. The hospital has three Philips CT scanners on site across its radiology and emergency departments, with two more to be installed as part of the Trust’s Community Diagnostic Centre. On average, the existing CTs scan a total of 100 patients per day. The latest Philips Incisive CT scanner was installed in April 2023 to replace an older model that had dated technology, longer initialisation times and a manual patient positioning process.

Equipped with the latest technology, the Trust is now benefiting from an improved CT experience; integrating innovations in imaging, workflow, and lifecycle management to enable smart clinical decision-making, and increased efficiency.

The Philips Incisive CT is fully equipped with the AI-based CT Smart Workflow which includes Precise Position, Precise Image, Precise Cardiac and Precise Intervention. It offers enhanced image quality with iDose, O-MAR and 70 kV scanning, enabling the Trust to accommodate a wide range of patients and exam types.

With the Incisive CT, the patient worklist is available on gantry side panels, allowing users to check patient details, select the protocol and patient orientation. The positioning camera will then suggest a start and end point for their planning scan, and the radiographer can select autoload for the patient to be positioned correctly in both horizontal and vertical planes. By the time the radiographer has walked out of the room the scanner has initialised and is ready to go. This enables the team to spend their time focusing on the patients rather than the technology.

Finally, Philips is so confident in the quality and reliability of its Incisive CT’s v MRC scan tube, that it has given it an unlimited use, Tube for Life¹ guarantee. This means in the unlikely event that the tube fails, Philips will proactively replace it at no cost, helping to reduce downtime and improve efficiency.