Agfa HealthCare presents its vision of an Electronic Medical Record enterprise IT platform in the United States

Delivering a phased approach for EMR introduction, Agfa focuses on patient centric clinical workflow automation driving the next evolution in decentralized community e-health patient care

HIMSS (booth #6737) / New Orleans, US, February 26, 2007, General centralized healthcare is evolving toward decentralized community care offering a new era of real patient-centered continuum of care. This trend requires collecting and offering information crossing the borders of medical specialties in a true Electronic Medical Record (EMR). This drives the acquisition and dissemination of information crossing the borders of geographically distributed care organizations. The mission is to collect real-time clinical and administrative data, as well as images along specific clinical paths to enhance the quality of care while reducing costs.

Depending on a specific patient’s care episode, the mission is also to have the patient ’flow’ through the appropriate clinical path as efficiently as possible with high quality results. Clinical pathways are now dynamic in that they trigger multiple clinical interventions per individual care episode. Today’s healthcare environment requires an intelligent solution that can explicitly enable the implicit clinical knowledge through process automation to ease the management of what can now be called dynamic clinical pathways.

Agfa HealthCare delivers this clinical path opportunity through its ORBIS™ solution in over 750 institutions across Europe with more than 450,000 daily users. Backed by the modular approach of the software architecture, implementation is at the pace of the customer and can be balanced in view of both short and long term efficiency impact; supported by intuitive human interface design, ORBIS is non-disruptive for the users. Strengthened by Agfa’s proven reputation in connectivity, ORBIS can integrate with legacy information systems and disparate departmental systems.

Globally deploying solutions, Agfa HealthCare demonstrates the strength and flexibility of ORBIS by delivering a unified single platform along the customer’s individual path to a fully integrated EMR. Agfa HealthCare’s vision of an integrated EMR includes:

• Clinical Paths - In healthcare facilities many clinical and operational paths exist - paths that need to be maintained and streamlined if the institution is to advance and provide high levels of patient care. This requires automation throughout the ancillary clinical disciplines such as Radiology, Pharmacy, Laboratory, Therapy Services, Nursing Management and Critical Care. Additionally, with over 80 separate modules, specialized solutions within ORBIS can address Surgery Suite Management, Critical Care Unit management, Skilled Nursing, Home Health, Workflow, Logistics, Dietary, Finance and more. Agfa HealthCare has created, based on its years of experience and listening to its customers, a comprehensive vision for a hospital’s enterprise-wide IT systems via patient-centric Clinical Paths.

• Enterprise Clinical Portal - Agfa HealthCare’s Enterprise Clinical Portal simplifies physician and nurse access through a unified view to relevant patient information, relieving the clinical care team of the need to manage multiple log-on IDs and passwords across various patient information databases. The Enterprise Clinical Portal also incorporates user authentication, authorization and audit control options to address security requirements, and streamlines workflow when integrated with a clinical information system.

• Enterprise Scheduling - Agfa HealthCare understands how important a facility’s relationship with the patient is and how essential it is to be efficient. Anything that can be done to help minimize the procedural aspects of healthcare ultimately benefits the patient and the healthcare provider. With our Enterprise Scheduling, staff can schedule appointments with ease. The reduction in training time and the process workflow optimization benefits it offers, can help foster better patient relationships.

• Clinical Data Center - Agfa HealthCare’s Clinical Data Center (CDC) is a real-time database of structured and unstructured data collected from disparate clinical sources. It enables management of large data volumes (beyond terabytes to petabytes) to satisfy permanently growing archives long term while allowing to fully take advantage of existing disparate legacy enterprise systems. Agfa’s CDC offers the unparalleled capability to leverage clients’ current Clinical Informatic solutions by providing a single ubiquitous view of all clinically relevant data, results, assessments and images across the patient’s continuum of care.

“These concepts create a step-by-step path in flexibility and scalability, providing an effective route for the hospitals and health systems to achieve a complete EMR,” said Stuart Long, Executive Director, Enterprise IT Solutions, Agfa HealthCare, North America. “This vision, enhanced by the introduction of the ORBIS platform in the United States, will move the industry toward the establishment of healthcare IT initiatives that help offer efficient diagnosis and treatment at healthcare facilities of all sizes.”

Contact Information

Margaret Turano

Director Communications & PR United States

Agfa-Gevaert Group

Contact via E-mail