Image-Transfer Management System Initiated in Australia

The company installed Agfa HealthCare's (Mortsel, Belgium) Impax PACS (picture archiving and communication systems) in late 2001, and implemented telereporting, computed radiography (CR), load balancing, and archiving in two subsequent roll-outs. This technology replaced redundant systems, increasing both productivity and profitability.

The Impax Enterprise Productivity Suite (EPS), developed by Agfa Australia, is a teleradiology system that monitors study transmissions between sites across an entire health network, and provides a global view of study location and status. It provides the end-user with a real time representation of every site and the studies resident at them. As a result, radiologists no longer have to locate work on the network or manually initiate study retrieves from sites across the network. This allows them to focus on reporting. The operational advantages of the system include simplification of information technology (IT) infrastructure and system queue management. Lastly, improvements to patient outcome can be achieved, especially for patients in rural areas, who benefit from report turnaround time of an hour, instead of the two or three days they used to have to wait.

Symbion Imaging now has 64 sites with teleradiology capacity. "Impax EPS sits over the top of our 64 sites, and gives us an enterprise-wide view of the whole network from one computer workstation. The solution gives us complete flexibility on a given day to handle manpower shortages, by effectively redistributing work with a mouse-click. It is so simple,” said Gary Nicholls, national major projects manager at Symbion Imaging. "Our corporate objective in this matter is to achieve economies of scale. EPS adds to our capability to expand our teleradiology network within Australia and internationally.”



Related Links:
Symbion Imaging
Agfa HealthCare