An integrated, flexible, vendor-neutral solution has been devised to provide digital archiving of paper-based and electronic documentation.

Agfa HealthCare (Mortsel, Belgium) is launching Hydmedia, its leading electronic content management (ECM) system for healthcare organizations, to the Canadian market. Hydmedia is an information technology (IT) solution that enables healthcare facilities to digitally archive healthcare information, including all paper-based documents, laboratory data, images, and any kind of electronic documents, to provide a single view of the clinical and administrative record. All records are stored using a patient context and are therefore easily displayed within a case, visit, or via document or specialty type.

Agfa HealthCare’s Hydmedia is based on common Healthcare level IT standards (HL7), which make its deployment and integration easier. It is a vital technology that cannot only share clinical data, but also all hospital data such as financial and human resource (HR) documents. Moreover, because it is vendor-neutral, the system can be embedded into third-party applications. Furthermore, the system can be integrated with other IT systems via standard IT interfaces, such as web services.

“Having a cost-effective and reliable archiving solution that also enables quick access of critical medical records as well as important hospital documents is key to any facility’s operations,” said Andy Hind, vice president, Agfa HealthCare, Canada. “Agfa HealthCare is pleased to be bringing our advanced enterprise content management system to the Canadian market so that healthcare facilities can benefit from efficient archiving, reliable recovery, and reduced physical storage space.”

Healthcare remains one of the most document intensive industries. Tens of millions of pages, combined with associated attachments, are created and frequently stored across multiple buildings or sites. By digitizing and integrating these archives directly into the hospital information systems (HIS) via Hydmedia, healthcare organizations are able to reduce the space and expense needed to store such information. This also allows hospitals to realize a faster return on investment, by reducing the amount of storage space and printing required.

Digitization and integration into the hospital information system (HIS) additionally enables administrators and clinicians to simultaneously retrieve and access these documents quickly and directly from their HIS workspace, via a single and easy to use interface. Enterprise-wide content management solutions help make data recovery possible in case of a disaster, securing critical information that would normally have been lost in paper format. Moreover, the system centrally archives scanned documents together with electronic documents, providing a single view of the complete archived patient record.

Since its addition to the Agfa HealthCare enterprise informatics portfolio, Hydmedia has been in use in over 350 hospital locations across Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Luxembourg, France, and the United Kingdom. Hydmedia is offered in conjunction with the company's leading image management and storage solution Impax Data Center or as a stand-alone solution. The system has been developed to support and enhance hospital information management on all levels, such as electronic patient record (EPR) systems, clinical, laboratory, and radiology information systems (CIS/LIS/RIS), as well as patient, administrative, and financial information.

HYDMEDIA is developed to maintain the integrity of the scanned documents and enables access to these archived documents by multiple users, spread over different locations, at the same time. The system is not yet available in the United States.

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