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The company rolled out its solution to 51 sites in within 18 months, after being selected as the preferred vendor by the Quebec Government.

Agfa HealthCare, being selected as the preferred PACS vendor for the Quebec Government, replaced film at 51 sites across the RUIS of Université Laval region. Despite of the slow moving process of eHealth adoption, the 'go digital' efforts to digitize radiology departments at hospitals across Canada are nearly complete. Dave Wilson, vice-president of Agfa HealthCare Canada expects Canada to be filmless by the end of 2010. "If you look at the Canadian marketplace for PACS and radiology, we are pretty much on the leading edge for saturation from a hospital perspective," he said.

The benefits of PACS which replaces traditional film based medical images with digital computer generated images includes allowing medical staff to manipulate images, access images remotely, share files immediately with other hospitals and reduce loss or misplacement. In the business of the radiology department, Agfa HealthCare has about 60 per cent of the market share in Canada. Wilson attributes part of the success to promotion and funding from Canada Health Infoway. "You really have to give a lot of credit to the Infoway funding and what they've done because it has stimulated hospitals to buy PACS and get that implemented," he said. With the foundation for radiology almost in place, the ability to populate that data into the electronic health system is the next step, Wilson noted. "Canada Health Infoway is driving electronic health records as are a lot of the provincial governments, so I think it's just a matter of time," Wilson added.

Wilson mentions radiology as one of the most challenging areas of eHealth due to the large size of digital images, incase of a typical chest x-ray , it could be 10 MB and a mammography image could be 60 MB . " When you are able to overcome that challenge of sending data over networks that are so large, the rest becomes pretty simple from a performance perspective," he added.

The company rolled out its solution to 51 sites in within 18 months, after being selected as the preferred vendor for the Quebec Government's request for proposal to implement a PACS solution across the RUIS of Université Laval region in late 2006. Paul Langis, assistant radiological department director at Hôpital Saint-François d'Assise, one of the recent deployer of AGFA slutions says that the major reason influenced the decision to go for  Agfa's technology was its compatibility with solutions from other providers and its experience in other countries. Deployment was fast and progressive, according to Langis. "We were well prepared and the Agfa support team was onsite to help our PACS managers and the IT team. The implementation was successful and the healthcare professionals were fully able to use the system after only six weeks,"  Langis said.

Agfa's system was designed for a U.K.-based project that performs 10 million exams each year, Wilson pointed out. "If you have five minutes of downtime, you are 20,000 studies behind. So you can't afford to have five minutes downtime," he said.  The architecture works well in Canada and hospitals can rely on it to always be running, Wilson said. The data centre technology is robust and reliable and has no single point of failure, he pointed out. "It's automatically routed to the other site so they never know they are down," he said.

Two major developments from Agfa are going into field trials at the end of September, among which the first is the ability to support XDS, which will enable cross-document sharing and the second is  is a zero footprint viewer that will provide remote viewing capabilities. Agfa is creating a viewer that will allow you to display medical images on any type of PC, said vice-president.

Source: IDG News Service