PACS/RIS Archiving Offsite Managed Services Project Initiated for Dutch Hospital

Off-site hosting of picture archiving and communication system/radiology information systems (PACS/RIS), which is providing a Dutch hospital with a “triangle” configuration of data lines between a hospital and two data centers ensures redundancy. Moreover, the solution as a service (SaaS) allows customer to benefit from functionalities without capital expenditure.

Agfa HealthCare (Mortsel, Belgium) reported that it is now providing a new off-site managed services solution to the Orbis Medical Center (Sittard-Geleen, The Netherlands). Under this agreement, Agfa HealthCare is providing its Impax PACS/RIS and long-term image archiving as a service out of two data centers, as of the end of February 2012.

The 570-bed Orbis Medical Center, in the southeast of the Netherlands, serves not only the 200,000 inhabitants of the neighboring Dutch municipalities, but also attracts patients from nearby Belgian and German areas. In all, it performs about 170,000 radiology exams yearly, using 23 different techniques, including X-ray, computed radiography (CR), computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and ultrasound. These also connect to over 60 other modalities throughout the hospital, including gamma cameras, photo cameras, microscopes, endoscopes, providing another 60,000 exams per year.

Since 2006, the Orbis Medical Center used a third-party information technology (IT) provider to host its Agfa HealthCare Impax PACS/RIS as a SaaS. Now, Agfa HealthCare is providing the SaaS itself, out of two data centers: in Aalsmeer, the Netherlands, and Agfa HealthCare’s headquarters in Antwerp, Belgium.

With Agfa HealthCare’s SaaS, a hospital has access to all the functionalities of an on-site or off-site Agfa HealthCare solution without any capital expenditure. Agfa HealthCare provides full management and operations, and selects the best choice for the housing and telecom partners.

Under the agreement with Orbis Medical Center, Agfa HealthCare handles the service level management, application management, system management and administration, infrastructure (i.e., servers, storage) and application provisioning, data center provisioning, and telecom infrastructure.

The installations are made up of o two VMware clusters with a fully redundant failover infrastructure. Private telecom lines of 1 Gbps from Dutch telecom operator KPN are used as data lines. These are configured as a triangle between the hospital location and the two data centers, for more redundancy. Long-term archiving will be handled by an Impax Data Center image archive, also based on SaaS. A service level agreement should guarantee the 24/7 availability of the solutions.

“We are very pleased to take this further step in our long-standing relationship with Orbis Medical Center,” said Ron Van Zonneveld, country manager NL, Agfa HealthCare. “We consulted closely with the hospital to determine the best Managed Services model for them. Agfa HealthCare’s SaaS solution manages both radiological and nonradiological images and that shows we deliver what we promised: a SaaS for complete medical image management.”

The solution is not yet available in Canada or the United States.

Agfa HealthCare, a member of the Agfa-Gevaert Group, is a global provider of diagnostic imaging and healthcare IT solutions.

Related Links:
Agfa HealthCare
Orbis Medical Center