What is the Image Exchange Portal?
The Image Exchange Portal (IEP) is a national service which enables the safe and secure transfer of PACS held images across a national network.
The system is available by signing up to the IEP community, to which most Trusts have registered. It negates the need for CDs. It is for the transfer of images relating to clinical care, not for teaching or research purposes.
The IEP is usually administrated by the radiology department. Please follow your Trust's protocols around IEP.
The Image Exchange Portal (IEP) is found at https://nww.iepservice.nhs.uk/iep/login.aspx.
Evelina London and image transfer
The cardiology department at Evelina London has its own IEP node for receiving echocardiogram (ECHO) images only.
Before transferring any images, please contact the cardiology team.
Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust has three IEP nodes currently so make sure you choose the right one:
- (Cardiac) Evelina London Children’s Hospital – for all paediatric cardiology ECHOs.
- Guy’s and St Thomas’ *All Radiology Images* – for all types of modalities for any speciality. This links with the Guy's and St Thomas' PACS system.
- Guy’s and St Thomas’ *Cath Lab and Echo images Only* – for all adult cardiology imaging.
If you need to send paediatric cardiology MRI or angio images please send them to the *All Radiology Images* node.
New requests for images
To request images from Evelina London, contact our clinicians by NHS email or telephone and ask them to send the images to your hospital’s node via the IEP. Please give the exact node to which you would like the images sent.
If you have an IEP account with your Trust you can request images on the IEP as follows:
- request images by entering the transfer tab
- select 'new request'
- ensure mandatory fields are complete (in peach)
- include an NHS number
- select priority – images required within 24 hours are priority ‘blue light’.
Transfer of images to Evelina London
To transfer images to Evelina London or Guy's and St Thoma's nodes via the IEP please contact our clinicians by NHS email or telephone. Inform them that images are to be transferred and get contact details of the receiving clinician.
Put in a request (following your Trust protocol) to send the images to the named clinician at Evelina London. Make sure that the correct images are being sent to the correct node.
If you have an IEP account with your Trust you can send images on the IEP as follows:
- select transfer tab
- select 'new transfer'
- select the required node from the drop down menu, for example '(Cardiac) Evelina London Children’s Hospital'.
Out-of-hours service
Sending images out of hours
Before sending images to Evelina London out-of-hours they must be discussed with our on-call cardiology team.
This does not always guarantee that all the images will be received before the next working day and could take up to 24 hours.
If you require imaging reviewed faster than this please liaise with the on-call team at Evelina London.
Receiving images out of hours
If you require images to be sent from Evelina London out of hours please speak to the on-call team.
Further information
All images must have an NHS or CHI (Northern Ireland) code or a unique 10 digit identity number (Scotland). This is for information governance reasons so that images can be identified and matched with hospital records.
In the event of the IEP being unavailable at Evelina London, clinical users will be notified and data transfers can be performed via removable media (CD/DVD).
The IEP is for exchange of images for critical patient care purposes. It is not intended to be used to export images for teaching, research or clinical trials.
ECHO images can take between four to eight hours to download to our system. This can vary depending on the speed of the network and size of the data files.
The (cardiac) Evelina London Children’s Hospital IEP node is for ECHO modality only. If other modalities are required, users will need to follow the Image Exchange Portal SOP for Guy's and St Thomas'.
To contact the (cardiac) Evelina London Children’s Hospital IEP team, the contact details can be found on the IEP under the nodes details.
For clinical queries please contact the on-call paediatric cardiology registrar via the main switchboard on 020 7188 7188.