Vendor-Neutral Image Infrastructure System Consolidates Data from Disparate Systems

A new 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.

Agfa HealthCare (Mortsel, Belgium), a leading provider of information technology- (IT)-enabled clinical workflow and diagnostic imaging solutions, reported that the Impax Data 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 key 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 Impax Data Center. The data center provides clear patient management benefits as exams and results will be available at every location in the hospital enterprise, consequently, enhancing patient care. The system is designed to meet the needs of new technologies such as multi-slice computed tomography (CT) imaging and allows for the extension of picture archiving and communication systems (PACS) into other image-intensive clinical departments, including cardiology and orthopedics.

In Canada, the system has recently been implemented to support the imaging needs of a joint initiative of 23 hospital corporations, allowing them to share diagnostic images and reports across 33 Ontario hospital sites. Ochsner Health System in Southeast Louisiana (USA) has implemented the Data Center to consolidate data from disparate multi-vendor PACS and clinical systems from its 6 hospitals and 16 health centers onto a single point of storage.

Due to its adherence to open standards, the Impax Data 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.

"[The Impax Data Center] is a proven technology that meets the most demanding expectations in modern diagnostic image management; that is, to efficiently administer and share clinical imaging information of thousands of users and millions of patients. Impax Data Center is designed to accomplish this, not only across multi-site hospital environments, but across entire regions,” stated Volker Wetekam, vice president of Agfa HealthCare's IT Division. "Agfa HealthCare is committed to vendor-neutral, open standards solutions. Our leadership and experience in enterprise-wide interoperability is what makes the ImapxData Center the solution of choice for our customers.”

Agfa HealthCare, a member of the Agfa-Gevaert Group, provides state-of-the-art systems for capturing and processing images in hospitals and healthcare facilities.

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