Agfa HealthCare to connect Royal Brompton and Harefield NHS Trust Hospitals using IMPAX(TM) Data Center

 

ECR (booth # 212-213) / Vienna, Austria - March 07, 2008 - 10:00 CET

 

Agfa HealthCare, a leading provider of IT-enabled clinical workflow and diagnostic imaging solutions, announces today that Agfa HealthCare has been selected to provide PACS (Picture Archiving and Communications System), RIS (Radiology Information System) and cardiology solutions to Royal Brompton & Harefield NHS Trust.  The Royal Brompton and Harefield hospitals will also be sharing their clinical archives through IMPAX(TM) Data Center, that allows the consolidation of data from disparate storage systems into one single point of storage.  Agfa HealthCare's IT solutions will transform the Trust's information workflow and enable the Trust to store all forms of diagnostic digital images - both static and moving - in one data center.

 

Royal Brompton & Harefield NHS Trust has a worldwide reputation for the diagnosis and treatment of heart and lung disease and treats patients from across the UK and internationally. It was one of the first Trusts in the UK to implement PACS, installing the current system in 1998. Over the next six to eight months, Agfa HealthCare is scheduled to install IMPAXTM PACS, IMPAX RIS and IMPAX Cardiovascular Suite, a suite of cardiovascular image and information management solutions, in both the Royal Brompton and Harefield hospitals. Even though the systems will work entirely independently of each other, IMPAX Data Center will enable an uninterrupted and fully secured flow of data between the hospitals.  It caters to the needs of enterprise storage for large, multi-site and multi-facility healthcare domains, by supporting the Master Patient record for a unified patient ID domain.

 

The deployment of the equipment represents a technical tour de force, as David Jenkins, Account Manager at Agfa HealthCare explains: "Over the next couple of months we will migrate all the data from the existing systems to one new, state-of-the-art, information system.  The Trust will benefit from changes that will enhance the experience of both staff and patients alike." To manage this vast amount of data, Agfa HealthCare will use blade server technology.  The blade servers are placed in a rack like books on a shelf. In conjunction with virtual machine ware, this will bring superiour availability, excellent resource management and security features to the system as well as realising environmental benefits with reduced power consumption and lower heat output.

 

Adam Bell, PACS Manager for Royal Brompton & Harefield NHS Trust, said: "Agfa HealthCare's integrated IT solution will help us to store all forms of diagnostic digital images in one data center, which will bring about significant clinical benefits for the Trust and our patients.  Graham Everson, Head of Information Services and Telecommunications at the Trust, added: "Agfa HealthCare's system will be a vital component of the Trust's overall Electronic Patient Record strategy which will make patient information available securely to our clinicians anywhere and at any time. It represents significant progress towards achieving our ultimate aim - a paper-free medical records system."

 

Agfa HealthCare kindly invites you to visit its booth at ECR 2008 (booth 212-213) to discover its solutions and Works in Progress.  The exhibition will be held in Vienna from March 7 until 11.  You are also invited to get a sneak preview and visit the virtual booth.

 

 

Agfa HealthCare's IMPAX Data Center is a scalable and fault tolerant DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communication in Medicine) archive solution designed to store clinical DICOM data objects, including DICOM encapsulated non-imaging objects (such as waveforms, structured reports and PDFs).  Today, patient healthcare information exists in multiple sources and formats. IMPAX Data Center addresses the need for consolidating information in a central clinical data foundation to provide comprehensive data at the point of patient care.  It takes multimedia information that will support the EHR (Electronic Health Record) and puts it all into one infrastructure. The Data Center goes beyond today's offering of one integrated solution for radiology and cardiology. It extends to orthopaedics, endoscopy, pathology, and other departmental medicine that generate standard based images, video, audio wave forms, visible light objects, clinical structured reports, test results and other clinical data.

 

 

Royal Brompton & Harefield NHS Trust is the largest specialist heart and lung centre in the UK and among the largest in Europe. The Trust is based on two sites in Chelsea, London and Harefield, Middlesex. The Trust has a 160-year history of expertise in the diagnosis, treatment and long-term care of heart and lung disease.

 

 

 

Alan Budge
Marketing Communications & Quality Manager Agfa HealthCare UK
T +44 (0)208 231 5984
alan.budge@agfa.com

 

Frederique Depraetere
Global PR Manager Agfa HealthCare
T +32 (0)3 444 80 06
frederique.depraetere@agfa.com

 

Johan Jacobs
Corporate Press Relations Manager Agfa-Gevaert NV
T +32 (0)3 444 80 15
johan.jacobs@agfa.com