Agfa Wins Business Development Award

Agfa Healthcare (Mortsel, Belgium) has won the Frost & Sullivan Business Development Strategy Award for European telemedicine for its secured information technology (IT) platform for telemedicine, which is a novel European cross-border landmark project that has been selected to link a number of hospitals in northern Germany and at a later date, Poland.

"This is a remarkable win,” remarked a Frost & Sullivan (Palo Alto, CA, USA) representative when referring to the reasons for the award. "In that Agfa is perhaps not thought of primarily as an IT company, even though it's clearly a leader in the medical imaging market. The cross-border project is a business development opportunity that reflects the growing role of Agfa in the healthcare informatics field.” Frost & Sullivan is a growth technology consultancy firm.

The project links the hospitals of Bergen, Greifswald, Stralsund, Pasewalk, and Ueckermunde in the northern region of Germany, with two Polish hospitals planned to join the project later this year, emphasizing Frost & Sullivan's view that Poland is a major opportunity for medical technology growth among the new East European Union (EU) member states.

"We are proud to win this prestigious award,” said Marcus Ostlander, marketing manger of HealthCare Europe. "By securing this key project in the Pomeranian region, which has the support of the EU Interreg Program, we have demonstrated the value of telemedicine.” The project's goal is to improve cancer patient care, and is coordinated by the "Tumorzentrum Vorpommern” with the University of Applied Sciences of Stralsund (Germany) as a technical partner.

At each of the five hospitals, digital images from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and computed tomography (CT) scans can be viewed and locally stored with Agfa's Impax CS5000 clinical review workstation. When there is the need for a second reading or consultation with physicians at the other hospitals, DICOM images are sent to the other hospital's Impax CS5000 workstation or to a shared central webserver located at the Stralsund University. In both cases, the patients must give their formal consent to do so. Additionally, image transfer takes place through a secured transmission, protecting the integrity and authenticity of patient images. When accessing the central server, authorized users must go through an authentication procedure before being able to view images.

Workstations at all five hospitals have also been equipped for
teleconferences, thereby enabling two or more physicians at different hospitals to discuss the shared images in a conformable and user-friendly setting. In this manner, the physicians can focus on the patient's images rather than on the complicated technology.


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