Consolidation Provides Complete View of Patient Imaging Data for seven hospitals and 35 health clinics in New Orleans
Mortsel, Belgium/Greenville, USA -- January 29, 2009-16:00 CET
Agfa HealthCare, a leading provider of IT-enabled workflow and diagnostic imaging solutions, announces today that Ochsner Health System of New Orleans has deployed the company's IMPAX® Data Center. The system, which manages diagnostic image access and distribution across the enterprise, is a leading image management and storage solution for large, multi-site and multi-facility healthcare domains.
Ochsner selected IMPAX Data Center in 2008 to consolidate data from disparate multi-vendor Picture Archiving and Communications Systems (PACS) and clinical systems from its seven hospitals and 35 health clinics onto a single point of storage. The solution supports all types of DICOM 3.0 medical images and diagnostic results including DICOM-encapsulated images, reports, waveforms and .pdfs. Highly scalable, IMPAX Data Center is designed to store and make accessible clinical data, consolidating information from multiple clinical departments and PACS vendors.
Before the IMPAX Data Center was installed, Ochsner needed to consolidate imaging data from multiple vendor PACS solutions in separate locations and departments, including images from radiology, cardiology, obstetrics, ophthalmology, and endoscopy systems. "Agfa HealthCare's IMPAX Data Center provides clinicians with easy access to our medical imaging data from anywhere in the hospital enterprise, regardless of originating department or hospital facility," said Dr. Lynn Witherspoon, system vice president and chief information officer of Ochsner Health System. "By providing access to the most current data from across the entire Ochsner system, it gives our clinicians a complete longitudinal view of the patient imaging record. Today IMPAX Data Center makes imaging information available to physicians using a single query, while allowing hospitals and clinics to keep their existing PACS and imaging solutions in place."
Given the importance of information availability, the IMPAX Data Center is delivered in a fault tolerant configuration that protects against a single point of system failure. The Data Center also features a high availability design, continuously monitoring itself for optimal system reliability and uptime. Ochsner installed a mirror data center at a remote location to enable continuous access to systems and data in the event of a disaster. "We've experienced many severe weather-related disasters in southeast Louisiana and we understand how crucial it is to maintain access to patient images and information in the event of an emergency," Dr. Witherspoon said. "This configuration of the IMPAX Data Center provides us with a complete copy of all image data, located at a distance from our primary data center but attached to our wide area network, thus allowing continuous data access in the event of loss of the primary archive."
"IMPAX Data Center is the next generation of storage archives that are patient-centric and vendor neutral, giving healthcare facilities the freedom from being locked-in to any single vendor," said Lenny J. Reznik, Director of Enterprise Imaging and Information, Agfa HealthCare Corporation, Americas. "It adheres to all relevant archiving IHE (Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise) Radiology, Cardiology and IT Infrastructure Profiles for storage, including XDS (Cross Document Sharing) and XDS-I (Cross Document Sharing-Imaging) and features a high availability design, continuously monitoring itself for optimal system reliability and uptime. IMPAX Data Center is part of Agfa HealthCare's vision for creating a standards-based foundation of clinical data that will enable the continuity of care for the Clinic's patients across a wide geographic area in multiple facilities."
Named one of Health and Hospital Network Magazine's 100 Most Wired Hospitals in 2008 for the fifth year in a row, Ochsner is committed to a longitudinal, patient-centric electronic medical record. "IMPAX Data Center enterprise storage capabilities help us reach our goal of a personal medical record that is 'virtually attached' to a patient, making the patient's health information available whenever and wherever the patients are present for care," said Dr. Witherspoon. "By supporting a clinician's ability to access imaging data from disparate PACS or other departmental systems, we are improving medical decision-making by helping them obtain a more complete picture of their patients' health."
