Enterprise System Increases Productivity Across Distributed PACS

A new system has been designed to improve productivity across distributed picture archiving and communication system (PACS) environments.

Agfa HealthCare (Mortsel, Belgium), a leading provider of information technology- (IT)-enabled clinical workflow and diagnostic imaging systems, has recently introduced its Impax Enterprise Productivity Suite (EPS), which has been developed that helps increase radiologists' productivity by managing diagnostic reading and reporting across distributed PACS environments. Impax EPS was presented at the Radiology Business Management Association (RBMA) Radiology Summit, held May 4-7, 2008, in Las Vegas, NV, USA.

The system is designed to help improve the radiologists' overall efficiency by creating an Enterprise Worklist for coordinating reporting activity across distributed sites over a wide area network (WAN). "The healthcare industry is challenged by a combination of digital imaging growth and a shortage of radiologists. Agfa's Impax EPS helps combat that by providing access to an enterprise-wide worklist and by allowing reporting tasks to be assigned across multiple sites,” said Al Dyer, Agfa Healthcare's ambulatory care solutions manager. "With an efficient, user-friendly, and intuitive interface, Impax EPS provides the flexibility and functionality to handle staffing shortages by effectively focusing on balancing work amongst distributed radiology resources.”

Impax EPS can also help radiologists decrease report turnaround time, while helping facilities reduce costs, increase productivity, and optimize resource utilization without increasing staff.

The system optimizes the use of specialty services by providing modality experts or subspecialty experts with a list of studies that need to be reported. It facilitates the distribution of workload during off-hours to those sites where radiologists are on-call, such as late or weekend shifts, and it maximizes network utilization by prioritizing sites for image retrievals.


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