Clinical Data Center Consolidates Data into a Single, Unified View

A new data center system is a real-time database of all structured and unstructured data from different clinical sources that presents a unified view of a single patient.

The Impax Data Center, developed by Agfa HealthCare (Mortsel, Belgium), a conduit into Agfa HealthCare's Clinical Data Center (CDC), utilizes a central bank of transactional and data services that can permit an enterprise-level of data and clinical content management. Agfa HealthCare's CDC will allow clinically relevant data from disparate systems to be grouped and restructured so that healthcare practitioners can more easily access the data about their patients.

As a component of the CDC, Impax Data Center provides management for all DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communication in Medicine) images and related data elements. Impax Data Center helps solve archive and storage issues that require dynamic options for digital imaging and Enterprise data storage. Impax Data Center provides a set of demographic data along with a number that uniquely identifies each patient along the continuum of care. This means that the Data Center can manage multiple patient ID domains. All data that are stored in Agfa HealthCare's CDC is linked to this patient identifier as its primary key.

"Impax Data Center is patient-centric and content-aware, and utilizes an open architecture for extensibility, giving healthcare facilities the freedom from being locked-in to any single vendor,” said Lenny J. Reznik, director of Enterprise Imaging and Information, Agfa HealthCare Corporation, Americas. "It provides fast storage and retrieval of data and images, and offers fault-tolerance for business continuity and disaster recovery, continuously managing and monitoring itself for optimal system reliability.”

The Data Center is a scalable and fault-tolerant DICOM archive system designed to store clinical DICOM data objects, including DICOM-encapsulated non-imaging objects (such as waveforms, structured reports, and PDFs). It consolidates data of disparate storage systems onto a single point of storage and caters to the needs of enterprise storage for large, multi-site and multi-facility healthcare domains. The system is helpful to healthcare providers in that it facilitates them to share patient data. More importantly, patients benefit from it as well, as their exams and the results of their exams are made available at every location in the hospital enterprise, in that way enhancing their care.


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