Agreement to Provide Automated Data Migration Services for Cardiology Improves Effectiveness and Quality of Migration Process

The system enables migration of cardiology imaging and nonimaging data.

Agfa HealthCare (Mortsel, Belgium) announced a new agreement with DataFirst (Raleigh, NC, USA), a solutions-based software engineering company. The companies will be providing unique data-migration service capabilities and archival storage solutions, enabling healthcare facilities to benefit from a very rapid data migration process from aged media and end of life archive devices.

Cardiology data migration often places a substantial demand on legacy technology (i.e., jukebox technology, DVD, MOD) as well as the often limited information technology (IT) resource pool in the current hospital environment. Risks include failure to migrate due to legacy technology obsolescence, resulting in clinical downtime, costly service calls, and indefinite or permanent migration failure. Utilizing DataFirst’s Hyper-Migration solution, Agfa HealthCare can significantly speed the process for facilities in contrast to standard Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) query migrations. Now, a large migration can be fully complete in days, making patient information available when and where it is required. This complete and rapid realignment of data storage is performed on the back end without an impact to the clinical workflow, while meeting the current and future business and clinical needs of the facility.

“Agfa HealthCare is changing the game in data migration by providing facilities with a better alternative that can significantly improve the efficiency and quality of data migration from what was often measured in months and years to weeks and days,” said Charles Wickens, global general manager, cardiovascular business, Agfa HealthCare. “By simplifying the migration progress with a modern alternative, Agfa HealthCare and DataFirst are enabling healthcare facilities to enhance their clinical capabilities by not only having quick online access to necessary data, but by also enabling them to more easily upgrade or switch to a newer software system.”

“We are extremely pleased to begin this relationship with one of the premier providers of healthcare IT solutions,” said Jake Berg, CEO of DataFirst Corp. “DataFirst’s migration technology is the perfect complement to Agfa HealthCare’s cardiology solutions. By incorporating hypermigration strategies for new and existing Agfa HealthCare customers, DataFirst eliminates the challenges associated with conventional migration tactics.”

In addition to providing migration services, Agfa HealthCare will also provide end-to-end support, upgrading the archive hardware to fully supported industry-standard technology, eliminating obsolete media, and improving archive performance, ultimately resulting in improved efficiencies. Also unique to Agfa HealthCare’s solution is that although data migration is primarily focused on just cardiology imaging data, now nonimaging data sets such as HL [health level]-7 reports can be migrated as well.

DataFirst is a solution-based healthcare engineering and implementation firm that provides comprehensive image migration and data management services, next-generation DICOM and non-DICOM strategies, archival storage solutions, iNtelligent picture archiving and communication system (PACS) data routing and integration, and specialized management tools.

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Agfa HealthCare
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