Agfa HealthCare signs PACS, Information Systems and Data Center agreement with Academic Medical Center in Amsterdam

Leading Dutch university hospital selects IMPAX RIS, NIS, PACS and Data Center after extensive review process

Mortsel, Belgium / Amsterdam, Netherlands - Agfa HealthCare, a leading provider of diagnostic imaging and healthcare IT solutions, announces today that it has signed an agreement with the Academisch Medisch Centrum (Academic Medical Center Amsterdam - AMC) in The Netherlands to upgrade its existing Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) and install a Radiology Information System (RIS) and Nuclear Information System (NIS). To support the University Hospital’s regional care requirements, the company has also signed an agreement for the installation of its IMPAX Data Center. Agfa HealthCare’s solutions were selected after an extensive review process involving five vendors and an independent ICT advisory consultancy.

The Academisch Medisch Centrum is one of The Netherlands’ leading university medical centers. It counts over 1000 beds and treats over 410,000 patients annually. The facility employs over 7000 staff members, educates over 2300 university students and publishes nearly 3400 scientific articles, studies, books and other literature each year. Agfa HealthCare’s IMPAX solution manages some 200,000 studies per year.

“We went to great lengths to ensure we were signing up with a healthcare provider that could meet our highest expectations”, states Professor Dr. Johan S. Laméris. “To achieve this we hired an independent ICT consultancy to help us screen a total of five leading vendors in the market. We concluded that the RIS/PACS solution from Agfa HealthCare was clearly the best. We are therefore happy to continue and expand our current relationship with them.”

“To have been selected by AMC after such a rigorous process is a true complement to Agfa HealthCare and its leading solutions,” adds Hans Vandewyngaerde, Vice President Agfa HealthCare Europe, “We are proud to continue to serve this distinguished academic institution and to be able to expand the scope of our solutions within the Radiology and Nuclear Medicine organizations.”

Amsterdam’s University Hospital will upgrade its current Agfa HealthCare PACS to IMPAX 6, its latest and web-deployable image and information management solution. The solution is designed to help streamline enterprise workflow and deliver increased efficiency and productivity to the facility. Agfa HealthCare’s IMPAX solution will be integrated with the hospital’s existing Hermes Medical Solutions software suite. Agfa HealthCare’s IMPAX Data Center provides large-scale multimedia storage for medical images and diagnostic results for hospital groups, regional healthcare organizations and national medical archives. The solution consolidates the data from disparate systems into a single point of storage to serve the needs of the enterprise. The installation of the Data Center will enable AMC to play its part in the e-Radiology project, set up to enable the sharing of radiology studies and reports within the Amsterdam region.

Agfa HealthCare’s IMPAX RIS and IMPAX NIS solutions enable users to electronically manage radiology and nuclear medicine specific operations, end-to-end, from patient registration through worklist generation and medical reporting to transcription and business intelligence. The specialized solutions for Radiology and Nuclear Medicine departments are designed to boost efficiency, improve workflow, increase productivity and help deliver high-quality information to hospital staff, patients and referring physicians. Agfa HealthCare’s Nuclear Information System (NIS) has been successfully installed at 11 sites in the Netherlands and was introduced to a broader European audience at ECR 2010 in Vienna.

“The combined capabilities of IMPAX NIS, Reporting and PACS, integrated with the Hermes Medical Solutions software suite enables us to further automate our clinical workflow, improve user convenience and reduce report turnaround time within the Nuclear Medicine department”, adds Dr. Hein Verberne, Chef de Clinique of the Nuclear Medicine organization at AMC.

“Agfa HealthCare’s commitment to high quality, driven by its nearly 20 year experience in the PACS and RIS sector, has once again been proven by independent and rigorous testing,” states Christian Reinaudo, President of Agfa HealthCare. “We look forward to meeting our commitments to AMC and an excellent relationship with them, today and in the future”.