October 8, 2014 — At RSNA 2014 in Chicago, Agfa HealthCare (South Hall A, booth# 4708) will focus on the ‘Future of Radiology’, demonstrating specific ways in which it is meeting the various and evolving needs of healthcare.
“This year, RSNA is marking its 100th anniversary, with the theme of ‘A Century of Transforming Medicine’,” comments Luc Thijs, president of Agfa HealthCare. “With more than 140 years of experience, Agfa HealthCare has certainly had a key role to play. However, we will not only highlight what we have done in the past, but also how we are supporting our radiology customers in the redesign of healthcare today, reinforcing radiology's value as a key driver of downstream health system metrics and helping positioning radiology as image management competence center for the enterprise.”
Proven Digital Radiography
Fast Forward Digital Upgrade: Agfa HealthCare has a global installed base of more than 50,000 radiography systems, all integrated with its next generation MUSICA image processing software. The company is committed to supporting healthcare providers in their continuous efforts to improve productivity, efficiency and image quality while further reducing dose. To support this, it has launched the Fast Forward Digital Radiography Upgrade Program, aimed to accelerate the transition from traditional CR to state-of-the-art lower dose Cesium based digital radiography in line with the recommendations of EuroSafe and Image Gently.
Controlling radiation dose: Agfa HealthCare will also demonstrate how it is focusing on patient dose reduction, including its recent U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) clearance for dose reduction for its Cesium Bromide (CsBr) Needle-based Image Plates (NIP) and its DR solutions. While these are valid to all general radiology applications, the emphasis will be placed on the pediatric and neonatal fields, where dose can be reduced by up to 60 percent.
This new program is already having concrete success, at hospitals including Loma Linda University Medical Center (Calif.), Summa Health System (Ohio) and Zwanger-Pesiri Radiology (N.Y.).
Ensuring True Added Value in Healthcare IT
Enhancing collaboration: Agfa HealthCare will highlight real-time chat and collaboration tools, image transfer capability and assignment-based workflow orchestration for workload balancing, as well as teleradiology workflow, helping meet new models for collaboration between radiologists, clinicians and patients, bringing imaging to all members of the care team across the healthcare enterprise.
Extending the clinical depth: Clinical Applications and advanced image processing tools can add immeasurably to the information the radiologist has for diagnosis and decision making, with unique tools that meet the precise needs of specialties. Agfa HealthCare offers an extended range of clinical applications and advanced imaging processing tools for positron emission tomography/single-photon emission tomography (PET/SPECT) and computed tomography (CT) fusion, tomosynthesis for mammography and MIP/MPR/3-D.
Improving productivity: How to improve productivity is a constant challenge for healthcare organizations. Agfa HealthCare offers productivity tools for radiology and beyond, throughout the healthcare continuum. These include personalized, task-based workflows and business intelligence monitoring tools with metrics on different levels and Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) to automate the management of vast amounts of data that form an enterprise imaging system.
Greater mobility: As mobility becomes an all-encompassing theme throughout society, Agfa HealthCare provides the mobile functionalities hospitals need, allowing healthcare to go wherever it is needed. These include web-based and mobile, zero-footprint image viewing functionalities, mobile report sign-off and mobile image capture and uploading. Agfa HealthCare is committed to developing and offering solutions that make sure that all caregivers can access and share the imaging information they need, improving patient outcomes.
Centering on the patient: In the multi-disciplinary healthcare model that has developed, a patient-centric approach is a necessity. Agfa HealthCare offers multimedia capture of images and video — taking imaging far beyond the walls of the radiology department — which provides access to a patient centric, encounter-based image record. Enterprise solutions reach across the boundaries of the healthcare institutions by offering patients and healthcare providers with tools that run from the start of the care process to the end for access to results.
Allowing radiology departments to focus on their core clinical mission: One of the challenges of hospital CIO’s is how to manage migration cost and complexity of the ever-expanding imaging archive. Agfa HealthCare offers a solution with a guaranteed performance, availability, and an almost unlimited storage capacity. On top of that, its Global Remote Incident Prevention (GRIP) monitoring services provide continuous monitoring and management to help keep hospitals’ IT infrastructures available, preventing unsettling downtime surprises. The services are also “future-ready” to accommodate new technologies and system developments as they are introduced, to easily grow within the customer’s ever-changing environment.
Support Radiology Customers in Redesign of Care
To support its radiology customers in the redesign of care, Agfa HealthCare is building an Enterprise Imaging Suite with advanced workflow solutions which allow for efficient quality diagnosis, timely and mobile communication to referring physicians and measurement of key metrics. Ultimately, these will reinforce radiology’s value and leadership role and put the radiologist firmly in the middle of patient’s care.
“These messages are all supported by concrete examples, which visitors to our booth at RSNA can discover for themselves,” adds Luc Thijs, “We are looking forward to showing how more than 140 years of imaging expertise and innovative solutions have uniquely placed us to help make a difference to the future of radiology.”
For more information: www.agfahealthcare.com
June 21, 2024 
