Agfa HealthCare demonstrates solutions at the Center for Disease Control's 5th annual Public Health Information Network event

IMPAX(TM) Data Center's interoperability highlighted at conference for public and private health industry officials

 

Mortsel, Belgium / Greenville, SC (US) - October 2, 2007 - 9:00 EDT

 

Agfa HealthCare, a leading provider of IT-enabled clinical workflow and diagnostic imaging solutions, announces today that it has presented its standards-based solution for demonstrating healthcare information exchange using IMPAX(TM) Data Center at PHIN (Annual Public Health Information Network) 2007.  The fifth PHIN conference was held in Atlanta, Georgia (USA) from August 27th to 29th, 2007. The CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) invited Agfa HealthCare to participate in the event, following the HITSP/IHE (Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel / Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise) demonstrations at the HIMSS 2007 IHE Interoperability Showcase.

 

State and local health department representatives - including public health managers, IT staff, public and private laboratories, hospitals and public health program staff - attended the event, and saw Agfa HealthCare/IHE interoperability demonstrations of XDS (Cross-enterprise Document Sharing) and XDS-I (Cross-enterprise Document Sharing for Imaging). XDS and XDS-I are IHE profiles that facilitate interoperability between diagnostic imaging applications interoperating with the EHR (Electronic Health Record).

 

At PHIN 2007, IMPAX Data Center was demonstrated to healthcare industry executives in the public and private sectors, to show how adherence to IHE and other standards in medicine are the foundation for ehealth solutions. IMPAX Data Center is Agfa HealthCare's next-generation technology that brings PACS (Picture Archiving and Communications System) into the realm of multimedia clinical data centers that can support the Electronic Health Record.

 

"Today, communication between care givers is a cumbersome, inefficient process than can sometimes take weeks. It can be expensive, frustrating, and can lead to multiple re-examinations and denial by insurance companies," said Lenny J. Reznik, Director of Enterprise Imaging and Information, Agfa HealthCare, Americas. "By using standards-based communication such as XDS and XDS-I, Agfa provides caregivers with better access to patient information putting them at the center of healthcare focus and addressing the continuity of care from the patient point of view. Now all caregivers - including specialty care facilities, imaging centers, hospitals and primary care givers - can share healthcare information seamlessly and securely."

 

 

 

Agfa HealthCare invites you to visit its booth at RSNA 2007, from November 25-30, (South Building - Hall A - # 4106) to discover its solutions and Works in Progress (WIP).

 

 

 

IMPAX Data Center is patient-centric and content-aware and utilizes an open architecture for extensibility, giving healthcare facilities the freedom from being locked-in to any single vendor. It provides fast storage and retrieval of data and images, and offers fault tolerance for business continuity and disaster recovery, continuously managing and monitoring itself for optimal system reliability.  IMPAX Data Center is a scalable and fault tolerant DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) standard archive solution, designed to store clinical DICOM data objects, including DICOM encapsulated non-imaging objects. It consolidates data of disparate storage systems onto a single point of storage and caters to the needs of enterprise storage for large, multi-site and multi-facility healthcare domains. The solution is beneficial to healthcare providers in that it facilitates them to share patient data. Patients benefit from it, as their exams and exam results are made available at every location in the
hospital enterprise, enhancing their care.

 

 

 

This year's conference featured workshops, informatics training, opportunities for networking with informatics colleagues (from the local, state, national and international levels) and opportunities to provide input to CDC on how to implement the PHIN initiative in the context of the larger national Health IT Initiative. The goal is to accelerate the development of a community that facilitates innovation and collaboration in public health informatics and National Health IT Initiatives. For more information, visit: http://www.cdc.gov/phinconference/index.html

 

 

 

Margaret Turano
Director Communications and PR United States
T +1 617 242 0725
margaret.turano@agfa.com

 

Jeff Lewis
Media Relations United States
T +1 201 373 4192
jeff.lewis@agfa.com

 

Frederique Depraetere
Global PR Manager Agfa HealthCare
T +32 (0)3 444 80 06
frederique.depraetere@agfa.com

 

Johan Jacobs
Corporate Press Relations Manager Agfa-Gevaert NV
T +32 (0)3 444 80 15
johan.jacobs@agfa.com