Enter Your Email Address to Receive a
Copy of MedicExhange Member Demograhpics

Agfa HealthCare working cooperatively with Oracle to deliver healthcare IT solutions designed to benefit healthcare providers with enhanced exchange of patient data and images and improve provider bottom lines.

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

"This new co-marketing 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 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 anAJAX(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, Microsoft Silverlight, etc. 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. CMIOs and CIOs will appreciate XERO's native ability to be embedded directly within the EMR / EHR and launched and controlled using traditional web-based integration methods.

Developed on Oracle database and Sun Java software application technologies,IMPAX Data Center provides the high levels of reliability 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 multi-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. Not to leave smaller organizations behind,IMPAXDataCenteralso smoothly scales down to support even smaller regional hospital that may "only" create a few thousand imaging studies annually.

Marc Perlman, Global Vice President for Oracle's Healthcare and Life Sciences, said, "The combination of Oracle technology and Agfa HealthCare's medical imaging expertise result in a true collaboration that enabled Agfa HealthCare to build a solution that can enhance the delivery of patient care and physician efficiency while addressing the financial challenges in healthcare. Agfa HealthCare leverages Oracle technology to address real healthcare IT challenges. It is a compelling example of how Oracle solutions are being used to accelerate insights for better health."

Source: Agfa HealthCare