Enterprise Image-Storage System Manages and Shares Data Using a Standards-Based Infrastructure

A vendor-neutral enterprise-imaging infrastructure allows healthcare facilities to efficiently manage and share clinical imaging information, and a new data center system is the foundation for healthcare enterprise specialists who want to take control of their clinical imaging information using standards-based infrastructure.

The Impax Data Center, developed by Agfa Healthcare (Mortsel, Belgium), is an important component of a hospital's archive, access, and disaster recovery strategies. Agfa HealthCare's Impax Data Center provides large-scale multimedia storage for all types of medical images and diagnostic results for hospital groups, regional healthcare organizations, and national medical archives.

The system consolidates the data from disparate systems into a single point of storage to serve the needs of the enterprise. The data center is a highly scalable and fault-tolerant Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) archive system designed to store clinical DICOM data objects, including DICOM encapsulated non-imaging objects such as waveforms, structured reports, and PDFs.

A major benefit of the system is that care providers are able to easily access various data sources within the hospital or regional enterprise, through one mechanism served by the ImpaxData Center. The system provides clear patient management benefits as their exams and results will be available at every location in the hospital enterprise, and consequently, enhancing their care. The solution is designed to meet the needs of new technologies such as multi-slice computed tomography (CT) and allows for the extension of picture archiving and communication systems (PACS) into other image-intensive clinical departments, including cardiology and orthopedics. Because of its adherence to open standards, the ImpaxData Center can be part of any existing or new Agfa HealthCare PACS, or exist in legacy or multi-vendor environments, further increasing data sharing and disaster recovery.

At the Radiological society of North America (RSNA) 2008 annual meeting, which will be held in November 2008 in Chicago, IL, USA, Agfa HealthCare will highlight a work-in-progress viewer technology that addresses one of the most common issues facing healthcare providers today--the task of delivering images and information to care givers across a wide range of technical and physical barriers. The Impax Data Center Viewer, powered by Xero, is a lightweight medical imaging viewer developed to provide access to imaging information for clinicians at any point of care regardless of network constraints and or the wide variance of platforms and administrative rules that can be so problematic for typical viewers.

The Impax Data Center Viewer will play a significant role in the delivery of images in the healthcare enterprise of the future. To meet the increasing demands of patient care, providers require a lightweight viewer that is fast, powerful, and innovative. The Impax Data Center Viewer is a cross platform image viewer based on Internet browser technologies extending the reach of healthcare providers to any location with a web browser and an Internet connection. The system's design delivers maximum deployability with minimal effort. Moreover, the ImpaxData Center Viewer uses an open architecture framework, known as Xero, which utilizes open-source software methods to allow for collaboration from industry and academic colleagues to further functionality and design.

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