Agfa HealthCare has signed a 5-year contract with University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust (UHB) to replace the hospital's current picture archiving and communication system (PACS), with Agfa HealthCare's IMPAX solution. The replacement solution, delivered as a managed service, involves both software and hardware and will include specialities such as virtual colonoscopy, mammography, echo cardiology and vessel analysis as well as IMPAX Business Intelligence to optimise the use of clinical, business, and administrative data to enhance efficiency.
University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust is the leading university teaching hospital in the West Midlands and includes the new Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham. The Trust employs around 6,900 staff and provides adult services to more than half a million patients every year, from a single outpatient appointment to a heart transplant. The Trust is a regional centre for cancer, trauma, burns and plastics, and has the largest solid organ transplantation programme in Europe. Mental health services and certain women's health services are provided at the nearby Mental Health and Birmingham Women's hospitals.
Contract delivers a truly PACS driven workflow with full reporting and Business Intelligence
Agfa HealthCare's IMPAX is a next generation PACS, designed to streamline the enterprise workflow and deliver increased efficiency and productivity. It is a single workflow-based system streamlining study reviews, offering a persona-based design, and enabling improved reporting and results distribution. The addition of the IMPAX diagnostic and clinical applications at the UHB will enable radiologists and clinicians to access specialty imaging tools for diverse sets of examinations from a single workstation.
Another key element of the solution is Agfa HealthCare's IMPAX Reporting which will provide a comprehensive interpretation and reporting workflow embedded in the PACS helping to decrease turnaround time whilst reducing or eliminating transcription costs.
IMPAX Business Intelligence transforms UHBs data into further actionable insight to enable more efficient operations by measuring and monitoring Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and providing real-time reports and dashboards, as well as historical reports.
Quality of solution key decision factor
Paul Brettlem, Deputy Divisional Director of Operations at University Hospitals Birmingham, comments: "The current National Programme for IT PACS contract was due for renewal, which is why we went out to competitive tender. We received three final bids, before awarding the contract to Agfa HealthCare. It was not about the cheapest solution, quality was a key decision factor and we felt the Agfa HealthCare solution was the best whilst remaining value for money. This solution also allows us to integrate with our other hospital systems and provide a truly PACS driven workflow."
Paul Brettlem adds: "The IMPAX PACS will be integrated to our existing HSS Radiology Information System and will utilise IMPAX Reporting and Agfa HealthCare's supplied voice recognition to enhance and speed up the reporting experience. IMPAX will also be integrated into our clinical portal."
IMPAX solution portfolio meets UHBs needs
Grant Witheridge, General Manager of Agfa HealthCare UK, comments: "We are delighted that University Hospitals Birmingham chose Agfa HealthCare for their PACS solution. The imaging informatics market in the UK remains hugely competitive and UHB made it very clear that quality and efficiency were key decision factors and that our IMPAX product portfolio demonstrated these qualities throughout the tender process. As a new customer to Agfa HealthCare we very much look forward to working in partnership with the Trust, helping them deliver their imaging strategy and achieve their goals."
- 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.