Canadian Healthcare Facilities Increase IT Access to Enhance Patient Care

Physicians throughout Canadian hospital imaging repository services are now able to view all diagnostic images and reports within the network using an enterprise-wide technology viewer, resulting in better access to information enhances referral capabilities and delivery of care for regional cancer centers and trauma treatment programs.

Agfa HealthCare (Mortsel, Belgium), a provider of diagnostic imaging and healthcare information technology (IT) systems, has effectively connected all 37 member sites of Hospital Diagnostic Imaging Repository Services (HDIRS; Markham, Ontario, Canada), giving them the ability to view all diagnostic images and reports through the deployment of Impax Data Center and enterprise viewing technology. Serving more than 30 percent of Ontario’s population, HDIRS member sites are now able to view the more than seven million exams available to be shared, and growing at a rate of more than 2.8 million exams each year.

“The HDIRS project is one of the most complex in Canada, both in terms of the quantity of clinical professionals and patients served, and we are pleased to be able to work with them toward the goal of dramatically improving access to vital health information,” said Andy Hind, vice president, Agfa HealthCare Canada. “HDIRS’ member facilities benefit from standards-based interoperability, data synchronization, and fast access to the complete imaging patient record which will ultimately streamline workflow and enhance the delivery of patient care.”

Impax Data Center is a scalable and fault tolerant enterprise medical imaging repository solution designed to store clinical Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) data objects, including DICOM encapsulated nonimaging objects such as waveforms, structured reports, and PDFs. Using Agfa HealthCare’s Impax Data Center, HDIRS is able to consolidate the information stored in disparate clinical information systems and picture archiving and communication systems (PACS) so that all imaging studies can be accessed. Vendor-neutral, it fully integrates with the individual hospital’s diagnostic imaging repositories into a unified repository, allowing the physicians across HDIRS to access all exams as published to the image repository by any vendor.

“Agfa HealthCare’s stable, reliable, and interoperable solutions have been able to provide a vital functionality to facilitate data sharing among our members, which is of the utmost importance in our multivendor environment,” said Pat Ryan, general manager, HDIRS. “The technology also provides a platform that is scalable, which supports our common goal of the future sharing of diagnostic images across the province of Ontario.”

Another added advantage of the system created through the use of Impax Data Center is the ability for individual hospitals and healthcare facilities to eliminate hosting of their long term medical imaging archives within their own system. By freeing the space earlier held by these data intensive files, hospitals can decrease on-going operational costs as well as use that space for other archiving purposes.

“Agfa HealthCare’s solution has enabled us to access images of a patient arriving in a clinic in a timely manner. We no longer require CDs to be available, to be located, or to be loaded in the clinic. The enterprise viewer is very easy to use with reports, and images are readily available when and where we need them,” said Dr. Catherine de Metz, radiation oncology program, Kingston General Hospital (Kingston, Ontario, Canada) and user of Agfa HealthCare’s enterprise viewer technologies.

The HDIRS project was funded by Canada Health Infoway (Toronto, Canada), the federally-funded organization investing in the implementation of reliable and secure health information systems, leading to the eventual goal of an electronic health record (EHR) for every Canadian. In Ontario, this is with the guidance and support of eHealth Ontario. HDIRS has been designed to incorporate with and provide patient data to the EHR.

HDIRS is managing the development, implementation, and operation of a shared diagnostic imaging repository. By working together, the HDIRS members are achieving economies of scale and shared service benefits that could not have been realized independently.

The HDIRS project is contributing to the Canada Health Infoway directive of developing an electronic health record (EHR) for all Canadians. HDIRS has been designed to integrate with and provide patient information to the EHR.


Related Links:
Agfa HealthCare
Hospital Diagnostic Imaging Repository Services