February 2, 2016 — Agfa HealthCare announced it would be showcasing its convergence approach to enterprise imaging during the 2016 Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society annual conference (HIMSS16). The company’s Enterprise Imaging and Enterprise Content Management (ECM) platforms will be on display at the annual conference and exhibition, March 1 - 3, in Las Vegas.
Hospitals and health systems are seeking fresh approaches to reduce unnecessary costs and improve outcomes. By empowering image information management with a single, converged platform, Agfa HealthCare Enterprise Imaging supports efficient collaborative practice across the continuum of care as underutilized medical images evolve into a strategic asset of the organization.
The platform is designed in modular services to anticipate the needs of greater healthcare systems: from department image acquisition workflows through interoperability of disparate systems, to clinical decision drivers and patient experience enhancement. Developed as a care-centric, standards-based workflow platform, Agfa HealthCare Enterprise Imaging improves interoperability and enables hospital groups, integrated delivery networks (IDNs) and public/private health information exchanges (HIEs) to create and efficiently share unified patient records containing both images and textual information within the electronic health record (EHR).
Agfa HealthCare Enterprise Imaging is designed to offer hospitals and networks a long-term, value-based solution that aligns with their EHR strategy by enabling multiple disciplines, including cardiology, radiology, ophthalmology and gastroenterology, to work and collaborate within the same consolidated platform. Via its open APIs and commitment to industry standards, the platform can replace departmental silos, potentially reducing cost, complexity and the need for multiple integrations. Hospitals and health systems have the opportunity to realize monetary savings in hardware and license fees, security risk mitigation and greater collaboration across the enterprise.
ECM brings together generic content management, clinical content management, process management, long-term archiving, business management and document management workflows, specific functionalities and a special design for the clinical environment. Thanks to its standard-based architecture for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) environments and many interfaces — also designed especially for the medical environment — the Agfa HealthCare ECM offers comprehensive interoperability with IT systems in general, and all kinds of clinical information systems in particular. Its integrated scanning modules help organizations to be paperless by integrating paper documents in their IT environments.
With its compliance to the IHE-XDS framework, Agfa HealthCare ECM is ready for regional health projects. It is not available in the United States.
More recently launched, Agfa HealthCare's Portal is designed to give a patient-centric overview of patient information from different sources, to different stakeholders in the patient's care, whether inside or outside the hospital. With the Portal, everyone involved in a patient's care — physicians, nurses, physiotherapists, home care providers, the patients themselves — have easy and quick access to all of the patient's health information. The 'patient view' functionality allows patients to both download and upload their own health information, while the 'clinical view' gives physicians access to aggregated patient health data for more informed decision making along the patient care continuum. By department or for the whole enterprise, the Portal can be integrated on top of Agfa HealthCare's Enterprise Imaging or health management systems such as ORBIS and ECM.
For more information: www.agfahealthcare.com