Agfa and Orion Health form Strategic Relationship for E-Health

Agfa Healthcare (Mortsel, Belgium) and Orion Health (Santa Monica, CA, USA) have combined their enterprise imaging and electronic health record/ hospital information exchange (EHR/HIE) expertise to provide global cost-effective health record consolidation and exchange across enterprises.

As healthcare facilities are expanding their EHR systems to include all patient data and meet Meaningful Use requirements, and as HIE projects are more rapidly deploying, images from Agfa HealthCare's Imaging Clinical Information Services (ICIS) platform can now be readily integrated into a shared “single best view” of the patient via the Orion Health Clinical Portal. Multidisciplinary imaging data will now be available in context with other patient data and documents drawn from multiple systems across a hospital network or health region.

The combined solution creates workflow efficiencies for regional-enabled Hospital Information Systems/Clinical Information Systems/Electronic Patient Records ( HIS/CISs/EPRs) that will provide cost-effective comprehensive information for care decisions, as well as e-health deployments across hospitals, health systems, regions, and nation states, and to help these entities achieve healthcare reform, offering more comprehensive information for care decisions and improved care quality and delivery.

“Today imaging makes up a significant percentage of health data, and Agfa HealthCare's ICIS platform offers comprehensive management of images regardless of where the images were created or are stored,” said Ian McCrae, CEO of Orion Health. “Bringing this wealth of diagnostic and clinical image data from Agfa HealthCare's ICIS platform into Orion Health's EHR or HIE will support more informed decision making and collaboration for clinicians, while managing costs for health providers.”

“Hospitals globally are extending their range of interactions with their patients and with the referring communities in the regions they serve,” said Luc Thijs, President of Agfa HealthCare. “Our relationship with Orion Health allows for patients to participate in their care, for community-based healthcare providers to have secure, role-appropriate access to the most useful parts of their patients' hospital records and for regional care teams to be coordinated over chronic disease programs.”

While the relationship has global scope, Agfa HealthCare and Orion Health will initially concentrate their joint offering on selected geographies in developed health markets, where economies of scale can bring the most benefit via cost savings and improved healthcare delivery. In the US and Canada, the focus will be on adding the clinical depth into the ICIS solution, while in France, Belgium and the United Kingdom, the focus will be on adding regional collaboration capabilities into the ORBIS HIS/CIS/EPR and the IT imaging solutions.

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