Agfa HealthCare Continues Enterprise Imaging Momentum as Health Organizations Strive Toward Value-Based Care in 2017

MORTSEL, Belgium and GREENVILLE, South Carolina, December 1, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

• Enterprise Imaging consolidates imaging data from multiple service lines and provides secure access to a patient's medical images, in one view, accessible 'anywhere, anytime'.
• Agfa's platform helps address value-based care challenges in increasing healthcare providers' efficiency through interoperability and clinical collaboration.
• A growing list of customers choose Agfa's single platform for a variety of imaging informatics capabilities.

In 2016, several large academic medical centers and community-based health systems across the United States signed up with Agfa HealthCare to enhance their IT systems by adopting a single platform enterprise imaging solution.

Agfa's Enterprise Imaging single platform is optimally designed for the value-based healthcare environment. Clinicians gain swift access to clinical imaging and multimedia content to bring value and efficiency across care settings. The company's platform enables users to lower costs and reduce demands on staff time by consolidating the IT infrastructure while making medical images an organizational asset. Agfa HealthCare's Enterprise Imaging supports change management initiatives to increase productivity and enhance delivery of quality care.

Agfa's Enterprise Imaging solutions begin with the vision that images should be an organizational asset to be used by health systems to help reach the mandates of value-based care, population health management and meet the challenges of the current and future reimbursement environments. Agfa's solutions enable images to be securely made accessible across a geographically disparate health system - providing the infrastructure so images can be housed, retrieved and evaluated in real-time across large and increasingly more complex enterprises. In this era of mergers and acquisitions roiling healthcare IT interoperability, a converged single platform solution such as Agfa's allows unrelated systems to find common ground.

Radiologists are demonstrating their essential role in the care continuum - but it does not stop there. Enterprise Imaging is more than a PACS, more than a VNA, and adds more value than by just a sum of parts. Enterprise Imaging makes the image the foundation of the medical record, but also draws together the systems, text and people who contribute to the patient record - both in creating it and viewing it.  With Enterprise Imaging, Radiologists can readily show their value in timely and confident diagnosis and treatment, creating a continuum of care, encouraging patient engagement and in supporting population health.

Other image capture modalities also benefit from the Agfa HealthCare platform. TAVR and echocardiograph imaging, for example, can swiftly be made available across the enterprise. Not only does this support the fast-paced work of a trauma center, but it also supports emergent needs transplant programs.

In the United States, Agfa HealthCare this year welcomed the UMass Memorial Medical Center, and the University of Mississippi Medical Center as just two in a list of new Enterprise Imaging customers. These medical centers chose Agfa to help them gain value from an ever-increasing amount of data and images. They join a growing list of customers around the globe who are at the forefront of medicine.

Outside of North America, new and existing relationships helped carry the Enterprise Imaging momentum:

• In the UK, a new 10-year contract was signed with the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust, which is upgrading its Agfa HealthCare PACS with Enterprise Imaging for Radiology.  
• Alliance Medical, Ireland signed a contract extension to provide its Enterprise Imaging platform across six hospital sites.
• In the Netherlands, both the VU University Medical Center Amsterdam and the Rode Kruis Ziekenhuis went live with their Enterprise Imaging solutions, and Zuyderland Medical Center successfully upgraded its imaging cloud solution and migrated to a new image data center, managed by Agfa HealthCare.

"There is a pandemic of problems impairing quality, clinical efficiency and data security as a byproduct of the growth and frivolous management of medical images-- from outdated legacy departmental PACS to fragmented data storage to careless use of image capture devices." stated Frank Pecaitis, Senior Vice President, Agfa HealthCare.   "Having learned from the journey and evolution of the electronic health record, more health care systems are recognizing these problems need to be solved through a contemporary platform-based technology rather than through disparate interfaced systems.  In an era of payment innovation, where providing high quality care under confined cost structures are key, an enterprise imaging solution is essential."  

For an image, courtesy of Agfa HealthCare, please use this link

About Agfa HealthCare  

Agfa HealthCare, present in one hospital out of two, is a leading provider of eHealth & Digital Imaging solutions. Care organizations in over 100 countries rely on Agfa HealthCare to optimize their efficiency and improve patient care.

Miriam Ladin
Director, Marketing Communications, Americas
T +1-401-604-2203
[email protected]

SOURCE Agfa HealthCare