AGFA GEVAERT : Agfa HealthCare and Dell team up to “Image-Enable” the EHR

- Collaboration advances the "Evolution of Visual Healthcare" by uniting Dell's Unified Clinical Archive (UCA) solution with Agfa HealthCare's ICIS platform to create a comprehensive image-enabled EHR - Fully integrated "document + image" EHR increases operational efficiencies, as well as clinical workflows, across the entire enterprise - Provides customers with a proven, validated reference architecture to capture, store, access and exchange all images generated by a health system

Agfa HealthCare announced today that it has teamed with Dell to integrate Agfa HealthCare's ICIS platform with Dell DRIVE Plus to offer medical image management within an Epic or other electronic health record (EHR). Highlighted in conjunction with the HIMSS14 Annual Conference & Exhibition, the collaboration is part of Agfa HealthCare's and Dell's focus to streamline customer workflows by providing easily integrated enhancements for the EHR, including seamless access to medical images within a patient's electronic health record.

Dell DRIVE Plus integrates the leading healthcare IT technologies and optimizes the solutions on Dell open-source platforms to make deploying and optimizing the EHR easier and more cost effective. In doing so, the platform helps customers expand their digital healthcare infrastructure to include a larger ecosystem of applications while eliminating the challenges of selecting, negotiating, integrating and deploying these solutions together.

"Dell's reliable infrastructure and secure cloud technology and long-standing positive relationship with Agfa HealthCare made the company an ideal cloud provider to demonstrate the value of ICIS solutions and advance the 'visual healthcare evolution,' " commented Lenny J. Reznik, Director, Enterprise Imaging and Information Solutions, Agfa HealthCare North America. "With this collaboration, hospitals and health systems can achieve significant clinical workflow and patient care benefits, as well as operational and cost efficiencies, because all patient documents and images are now integrated and accessible from a single, cloud-based EHR system."

Agfa HealthCare's ICIS solution is a proven, comprehensive approach to enterprise imaging management that delivers a workflow-centric platform to make multispecialty image data readily available to physicians across the continuum of care. This model supports the potential clinical and resource benefits of images that are provided by the patient-centric presentation of an EHR.

"Agfa HealthCare's robust ICIS platform empowers Dell DRIVE Plus with the highly important element of medical image management," said August Calhoun, Ph.D., vice president/general manager of Dell Healthcare and Life Sciences. "This not only helps to reduce costs, but also enhances patient care by improving clinician accessibility to the full scope of patient information. ICIS allows for images and data from multiple medical imaging applications as well as non-medical imaging applications to be consolidated into one single view, heightening the value of the EHR."

Showcasing the value of a fully integrated, "document + image" EHR, Agfa HealthCare will be sponsoring the "HIMSS Enterprise Imaging Educational Breakfast" on February 25, 2014 from 7:00 - 8:30 a.m. Cheryl Petersilge, MD, Medical Director, MyPractice Imaging Solutions, Cleveland Clinic, and Louis M. Lannum, Director of Enterprise Imaging, MyPractice Imaging Solutions, Cleveland Clinic, will be the featured speakers in a thought leadership program focused on the importance of patient-centric medical imaging and document accessibility in an enterprise-wide EHR. HIMSS attendees who are hospital CIOs, CMIOs, vice presidents, directors of clinical applications, and other healthcare provider executives or healthcare editors are invited to register at www.HIMSS.org/imaging14.