Enterprise Visualization Solution Enables Image Storage Consolidation and Clinical Image Exchange and Distribution

A standards-based solution facilitates healthcare information exchange and helps organizations maintain continuity of care for patients.

Agfa HealthCare (Mortsel, Belgium), a provider of diagnostic imaging and healthcare information technology (IT) solutions, announced an advanced healthcare enterprise visualization strategy that combines the company's Impax Data Center and Impax Mobility systems to provide managed imaging record access and distribution across healthcare enterprises and regional networks.

"Enterprise Visualization is Agfa HealthCare's vision for creating a standards-based foundation of clinical data management that will enable organizations to maintain the continuity of care for patients across a wide geographic area in multiple facilities," said Lenny J. Reznik, director of Enterprise Imaging and Information, U.S., Agfa HealthCare. "With our emphasis on vendor neutrality and open standards, healthcare facilities can distribute their imaging data, regardless of department origin, to the edges of hospital network, to the referring physician desktop, and to other caregivers within an HIE [Healthcare Information Exchange]."

Enterprise Visualization is an image management and storage solution for large, multidepartmental, multisite, and multifacility healthcare domains. Powered by Impax Data Center and Impax Mobility, it transforms multiple, independent picture archiving and communication systems (PACS) and standards-based clinical data into a comprehensive enterprise system that consolidates, integrates, and enables access to medical imaging information across facilities and expands accessibility by deploying a single enterprise viewer for all disparate visual data. Enterprise Visualization can help set the foundation for the true multi-media electronic health record (EHR).

The Impax Data Center is an incrementally scalable, vendor-neutral Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine- (DICOM)-based clinical image and information archive that is designed to consolidate patient data from existing multivendor PACS in separate locations and departments. Lightweight and bandwidth-aware, Impax Mobility is a secure clinical imaging viewing platform that uses server-side computing and a microfootprint software client application that does not depend on Sun Microsystems' Java, Microsoft .NET, Adobe Flash Player applications, or administrative rights to distribute imaging data to clinicians. Server-side computing uses the latest in cloud computing technology to process images where they originate and uses adaptive streaming to provide efficient distribution of images, clinical data, and analysis tools.

Combined, Impax Data Center and Impax Mobility comprise an enterprise visualization solution that: provides a PACS vendor-neutral archive for existing and future PACS; creates a repository for the unified longitudinal patient imaging record; provides diagnosticians with access to current and prior studies regardless of where they were acquired; improves services for referring physicians and remote specialists; and allows access to consolidated clinical data at the point-of-care.

Agfa HealthCare's solution for enterprise visualization supports all types of DICOM 3.0 medical images and diagnostic results including images, markup, key objects, reports, waveforms, and DICOM-encapsulated. PDFs. It provides the end user with a rich set of two-dimensional (2D) and 3D image review and manipulation tools, may be launched from the electronic medical record (EMR), web portal or personal computer (PC), and is deployable to virtually any wired/wireless Windows-based PC, laptop, tablet, Ultra Mobile PC, or Smartphone device.

Impax Mobility is manufactured by Medical Insight A/S (Valby, Denmark) as EasyViz.

Agfa HealthCare, a member of the Agfa-Gevaert Group, is a leading provider of IT-enabled clinical workflow and diagnostic image management solutions, and systems for capturing and processing images in hospitals and healthcare facilities.

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Agfa HealthCare
Medical Insight