AGFA-GEVAERT : Agfa HealthCare’s Solution as a Service (SaaS*) goes live at Orbis Medical Center

- Agfa HealthCare provides off-site hosting of IMPAX PACS/RIS 24/7/365.
- 'Triangle' configuration of data lines between hospital and two Agfa HealthCare data centers ensures redundancy.
- Solution as a Service allows customer to benefit from functionalities without capital expenditure.

Agfa HealthCare announces today that it is now providing a new off-site managed services solution to the Orbis Medical Center in Sittard-Geleen, the Netherlands. Under this agreement, Agfa HealthCare is delivering its IMPAX Picture Archiving and Communication System/Radiology Information System (PACS/RIS) and long-term image archiving as a service out of two data centers, as of end February 2012.

A multimodality, multi-department environment

The 570-bed Orbis Medical Center, in the south-east of the Netherlands, serves not only the 200,000 inhabitants of the neighboring Dutch municipalities, but also attracts patients from nearby Belgian and German areas. In all, it carries out some 170,000 radiology exams each year, using 23 different modalities, including X-ray, CR, CT, MRI and Ultrasound. These also connect to over 60 other modalities throughout the hospital, including gamma cameras, photo cameras, microscopes, endoscopes, etc., providing another 60,000 exams per year.

Full access to functionalities

Since 2006, the Orbis Medical Center used a third-party IT provider to host its Agfa HealthCare IMPAX PACS/RIS as a Solution as a Service (SaaS). Now, Agfa HealthCare is providing the SaaS itself, out of two data centers: in Aalsmeer, the Netherlands, and Agfa HealthCare's headquarters in Antwerp, Belgium.

With Agfa HealthCare's SaaS, a hospital has access to all the functionalities of an on-site or off-site Agfa HealthCare solution without any capital expenditure. Agfa HealthCare provides full management and operations, and selects the best choice for the housing and telecom partners.

Under the agreement with Orbis Medical Center, Agfa HealthCare handles the service level management, application management, system management and administration, infrastructure (servers, storage, etc.) and application provisioning, data center provisioning and telecom infrastructure.

Made-to-order SaaS solution

The installations are comprised of two VMware clusters with a fully redundant failover infrastructure. Private telecom lines of 1 Gbps from Dutch telecom operator KPN are used as data lines. These are configured as a triangle between the hospital location and the two data centers, for more redundancy.

Long-term archiving will be handled by an IMPAX Data Center image archive, also based on SaaS. A service level agreement should guarantee the 24/7/365 availability of the solutions.

"We are very pleased to take this further step in our long-standing relationship with Orbis Medical Center," says Ron Van Zonneveld, Country Manager NL, Agfa HealthCare. "We consulted closely with the hospital to determine the best Managed Services model for them. Agfa HealthCare's SaaS solution manages both radiological and non-radiological images and that shows we deliver what we promised: a SaaS for complete Medical Image Management."

* Not available in Canada or the US