Agfa HealthCare, a leading provider of diagnostic imaging and healthcare IT solutions, announced the launch of IMPAX Data Center, its award-winning enterprise medical imaging repository, in the Nordic Region. The launch supports Agfa HealthCare's commitment to this region, which has long been at the forefront of healthcare IT use in its care system. Agfa HealthCare is well-positioned to support the individual countries' healthcare ambitions: to reduce costs while increasing efficiency in the delivery of patient care.
Forward-looking demand for regionally-driven healthcare structure
The Scandinavian region encompassing Denmark, Finland, Sweden and Norway is often seen as an early adopter of some of the most recent and innovative healthcare IT solutions. As boundaries between care providers, hospitals and care facilities of all kinds fade into more regionally-driven care structures, several markets in the region have also adapted their healthcare models to meet current demands.
Bringing imaging into a unified, integrated, centrally-managed system
Agfa HealthCare is focused on fulfilling the needs of these healthcare facilities in consolidating their IT infrastructure, sharing data and potentially operating in a setting with shared workflows among hospitals, clinics or even health regions.
IMPAX Data Center, a scalable, PACS-vendor neutral, enterprise image management solution that integrates and links data across departments, facilities and regions, is the cornerstone for such an environment.
IMPAX Data Center serves a key role in creating a longitudinal image enabled Electronic Medical Record (EMR) or regional Electronic Health Record (EHR), bringing the next major information space - imaging - into a unified, tightly-integrated and centrally-managed system.
Single point of access to image data
With IMPAX Data Center Viewer, powered by XERO, authorized clinicians regardless of location have a single point of access to imaging data from disparate systems. IMPAX Data Center Viewer is a zero footprint web viewer that accommodates a wide variety of platforms and has modest network bandwidth requirements using the latest Web 2.0 technology.
Hospitals become active players in e-Health initiatives
IMPAX Data Center supports the functionality to store and manage native DICOM 3.0 and/or DICOM 3.0 encapsulated data, but also provides support for IHE's Cross Enterprise Document Sharing (XDS) integration profile, including the imaging-specific integration profile: Cross Enterprise Document Sharing for Imaging (XDS-I). This makes IMPAX Data Center suitable for storing and exchanging patient records originating from different healthcare organizations or enterprises.
IMPAX Data Center enables hospitals to become active players in e-Health initiatives, because it acts as an XDS-I proxy for Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS) that do not support XDS-I. These PACS can continue to use DICOM, while also accessing patient imaging data from other organizations.
IMPAX Data Center offers cost, efficiency and enhanced care benefits
"Our proven IMPAX Data Center solution supports imaging needs as facilities expand from local to regional care or from single to multi-site facilities, driven by demand for cost reduction and improved efficiency and care delivery," explains Georgios Spitadakis, Head of Marketing IT Region Europe at Agfa HealthCare. "With more than 20 years of experience in healthcare IT, we are an excellent match for an early-adopter region like Scandinavia to support this next level move."
Related news articles:
- Agfa HealthCare's Profile
About Agfa
The Agfa-Gevaert Group is one of the world's leading companies in imaging and information technology. Agfa develops manufactures and markets analogue and digital systems for the printing industry (Agfa Graphics), for the healthcare sector (Agfa HealthCare), and for specific industrial applications (Agfa Materials). Agfa is headquartered in Mortsel, Belgium. The company is present in 40 countries and has agents in another 100 countries around the globe. The Agfa-Gevaert Group achieved a turnover of 2,755 million euro in 2009.
About Agfa HealthCare
Agfa HealthCare, a member of the Agfa-Gevaert Group, is a leading global provider of diagnostic imaging and healthcare IT solutions. The company has nearly a century of healthcare experience and has been a pioneer on the healthcare IT market since the early 1990's. Today Agfa HealthCare designs, develops and delivers state-of-the-art systems for capturing, managing and processing diagnostic images and clinical/administrative information for hospitals and healthcare facilities, as well as contrast media solutions to enable effective medical imaging results. The company has sales offices and agents in over 100 markets worldwide. Sales for Agfa HealthCare in 2009 were 1,178 million euro. For more information on Agfa HealthCare, please visit www.agfahealthcare.com.