Cloud and Managed Services Designed for Medical Image Archiving, Viewing, and PACS

Healthcare information technology (IT) departments are increasingly turning to cloud strategies as a business solution to manage their concerns with system uptime, staff shortages, and the explosive growth of data volume. An international healthcare company has developed a wide range of cloud and managed services systems, ranging from selective on-site services up to off-site cloud models that can fit into the capital or operating expense structure of any facility.

Agfa HealthCare (Mortsel, Belgium) introduced its expanded portfolio of cloud and managed services offerings at the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) scientific assembly and annual meeting, November 27- December 2, 2011, in Chicago (IL, USA). The company has advanced its range of managed services models to better help healthcare facilities of varied sizes achieve their performance and cost objectives with reliable and trusted solutions.

“As healthcare facilities today are finding themselves under increased pressure to deliver improved clinical and operational results, many times with fewer resources, Agfa HealthCare has taken an approach to managed services that will help meet the unique challenges of any facility,” said Lenny J. Reznik, director, enterprise imaging and information, Agfa HealthCare US “We appreciate the day-to-day demands of IT in supporting clinical performance, and so we are taking a consultative approach to the delivery of our expanded managed services to understand and address the needs of each customer facility.”

Working together with the customer, the Agfa HealthCare team will help identify the appropriate model that suits current and future expected needs. Among the managed services options, a variety of which are successfully deployed at more than 80 sites worldwide, are the following: Remote management provides assistance to facilities seeking to outsource the daily management of their on-site Impax Data Center and Xero technology viewer and/or Impax radiology picture archiving and communication system (PACS). Remote management is a good choice for customers looking for a commitment to a level of availability, freeing-up their internal IT resources, for a fixed monthly fee. Managed hosting offers the full support of remote management with the addition of off-site hosting. Agfa HealthCare takes the end-to-end responsibility, focusing on the level of availability, for a fixed monthly fee. PACS as a service enables facilities to have the functionalities of Impax radiology PACS at a fee-per-use basis. Available as an off-site or an on-site system and inclusive of the management, operations, housing facility, and optional telecom, this model also includes the provision of IT infrastructure and application functionalities supporting the agreed-to service level targets and growth requirements. Agfa HealthCare is committed to availability and performance targets.

In the field of medical imaging, Agfa HealthCare offers image archiving and viewing as a service.
This service allows PACS vendor-neutral, DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) 3.0-compliant, on-demand retrieval for medical images and reports using Impax Data Center and the Xero viewer. The service can be delivered as a single departmental archive up to a regional image repository service, offering a high performance medical image and report distribution service to referring physicians. The image archiving and viewing services can begin from an off-site secondary archiving service for archiving a second copy of data offsite for disaster recovery, and move up to a hybrid or off-site primary or secondary archiving service utilizing geographically distributed datacenters, offering business continuity, disaster recovery, and data protection.

“Our overall goal with our consultative approach and expanded line of offerings is to help bring peace of mind to healthcare IT teams,” said Patrick Hendrickx, global business development manager, managed services, Agfa HealthCare. “By working together with customers to select their preferred model and service offering, Agfa HealthCare is committed to allowing providers to focus on the quality and efficiency of the care they provide, while relying on our IT cloud services expertise for support.”

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