Enhancements Developed to Medical Imaging Repository for Capture, Sharing of Imaging Data

New technology has been designed that will support the healthcare provider community in bringing the last major information category--imaging--into electronic medical records (EMRs) and electronic health records (EHRs), literally "visualizing” EHRs and EMRs to help meet requirements of meaningful use and challenges of healthcare transformation in the age of imaging-enabled medicine.

Agfa HealthCare (Mortsel, Belgium), a provider of diagnostic imaging and healthcare information technology (IT) solutions, announced that its Impax Data Center 2.0 is now available in the United States. "Agfa HealthCare's Impax Data Center 2.0 offers a foundation of imaging infrastructure to healthcare enterprises committed to taking full control of clinical imaging information,” said Lenny J. Reznik, Agfa HealthCare's director of enterprise imaging and information.

Featuring a vendor-neutral repository for all images across the enterprise, Impax Data Center 2.0 uses IHE (Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise) PIX (Private Internet eXchange) and XDS(-I; extended data services) to deliver cross-enterprise sharing of patient data, as well as an industry-endorsed framework that integrates patient records across facilities and patient identifiers.

The Data Center 2.0 helps to reduce integration complexity, promote business continuity, centralize operations, lower IT costs, and provide an integrated patient record for improved delivery of care. XDS implementations are slated for multiple sites in Canada with the potential to cover over 40% of Canadian patients.

Used in combination with Impax Data Center 2.0, Agfa HealthCare's unique Xero technology embeds and integrates dynamic standards-based image and results viewing into EHRs and EMRs, freeing providers from the burden of client software installation.

Added Mr. Reznik, "Used together, these two Agfa HealthCare solutions support CIOS [chief information officers], CMIOs [chief medical information officers], and medical leaders in extending EMRs and EHRs to include support for all medical images, while offering practicing clinicians streamlined access to a newly invigorated longitudinal patient record.”

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