Agfa HealthCare announces that on September 12, 2012, it signed an agreement with Máxima Medisch Centrum in the Netherlands to upgrade its Radiology Information System (RIS) and Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) with a solution that extends to cardiology and nuclear medicine. The deal includes a comprehensive, 10-year Managed Services contract that provides the hospital continuously upgraded systems and minimum downtime.
Moving towards a hospital-wide PACS
Máxima Medisch Centrum has two sites, in Veldhoven and Eindhoven, with a total of 595 beds. Its 3,400 staff members, including 195 specialists, care for about 25,000 in-patients each year.
The medical center is committed to implementing a hospital-wide PACS solution that can also be integrated with other hospitals. In a major step towards achieving this, it launched a tender for a solution that would upgrade its RIS and PACS, and cover cardiology and nuclear medicine as well.
The tender's very stringent requirements included the need for a product package that was already available. In total, five major players in the field were invited to demonstrate their solutions.
Images from multiple departments, on a single viewer
Agfa HealthCare was especially noted for its future-proof and user-friendly solutions, and was selected for the project. The solution to be delivered will include its IMPAX 6, IMPAX for Cardiology, IMPAX for Nuclear Medicine and IMPAX Data Center (IDC). IMPAX 6 is the latest version of Agfa HealthCare's proven image and information management solution.
IMPAX for Nuclear Medicine delivers the benefits of integrated care to the nuclear medicine department and supports the patient's entire exam flow, while IMPAX for Cardiology enables patient-centric cardiac management, with all the relevant data promptly available. IDC is Agfa HealthCare's scalable enterprise imaging management solution, which can store imaging data from many departmental imaging systems and disparate hospital PACS systems.
Together, these solutions will allow doctors at Máxima Medisch Centrum to view images from radiology, cardiology and nuclear medicine from a single viewer, increasing productivity.
'Future-proof' Managed Services contract
In addition, the agreement includes a 'smart' Managed Services contract and GRIP (Global Remote Incident Prevention), Agfa HealthCare's remote monitoring and event management solution for PACS and IT infrastructure. "By including all software and hardware upgrades, this comprehensive service contract offers us cost transparency because we will not need to make any additional investments in the system for the next 10 years, while also supporting minimum downtime," explain Robert Waterschoot, Functional Application Manager and Jef Pluijmen, Radiology Manager, Máxima Medisch Centrum.
"We were very pleased to demonstrate to Máxima Medisch Centrum the strengths and value of our IMPAX solutions," comments Albert Vroklage, Key Account Manager, Agfa HealthCare, the Netherlands. "Not only did our solution meet all of the hospital's very stringent requirements, but the service contract offers them peace of mind for the next 10 years."
- 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 2,948 million euro in 2010.
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 2010 were 1,180 million euro.