Collaboration for Greater Exchange of Patient Data at Point-of-Care

organization is working collaboratively with Oracle (Redwood Shore, CA, USA) and has entered into a new relationship that will benefit healthcare providers by enabling greater exchange of patient data and clinical images at the point of care. With the new collaboration, Agfa HealthCare's go-to-market strategy for Impax Data Center is enhanced. Impax Data Center utilizes Oracle healthcare solutions and infrastructure software.

In this new collaboration, Agfa HealthCare will offer to providers its highly scalable healthcare information technology (IT) systems to support medical imaging and information consolidation projects for the electronic medical record (EMR), electronic health record (EHR), and health information exchanges (HIEs) for the largest health systems, regional health exchanges, and national health systems. As a result, the availability of information at the point of care will enhance the delivery of patient care and treatment.

"This new comarketing and sales organization alignment will cooperatively market solutions to healthcare providers and change the way they look at diagnostic and clinical imaging as part of the patient's health record,” said Michael Green, vice-president North America, Agfa HealthCare. "We offer game-changing solutions that provide access to patient imaging across the enterprise. Our goal is to cooperatively deliver these advanced solutions to solve today's modern healthcare challenges.”

The Impax Data Center solution includes an enterprise medical-imaging repository that consolidates both diagnostic and clinical patient images and associated data across dozens of departments including cardiology, ophthalmology, surgery, dermatology, gastroenterology, pathology, surgery, dentistry, obstetrics, nursing, and other clinical departments and in wide range of Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) and DICOM-encapsulated formats, including still images such as TIFF, BMP, GIF, JPEG, moving or video data such as AVI, WMV, and MPEG, waveform data types such as ECG, EEG, and MP3, and a variety of report data types including PDF files.

A key component of the Impax Data Center solution is a no-software download medical imaging viewer. Agfa HealthCare's Xero technology directly addresses the healthcare market's need for faster, better access to imaging information as part of EMR/EHR or HIE. Internally developed Xero technology is a Web 2.0 platform that uses an AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) interface to manipulate text and image information in the user's web browser. Xero technology converts images and content for display in the browser without requiring any client software installation or download of any additional libraries or application frameworks such as Sun Java, Adobe Flash, and Microsoft Silverlight. Physicians will have fast, dynamic access to the complete medical imaging record, including reports, images, and imaging-related information such as standards-based markup and key image notes.

Developed on Oracle database and Sun Java software application technologies, the Impax Data Center provides the high levels of effectiveness and scalability required of national health systems, as well as the largest health networks, which can easily generate millions to tens of millions of medical imaging studies annually and require management of multiple petabytes of medical imaging information. Organizations of this scale demand a level of performance in a business continuity-ready active-active multi-data center environment as Oracle and Impax Data Center deliver

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