Cardiovascular IT System Integrates Heart Images and Reports into One Workflow

A new powerful cardiovascular information technology (IT) system now integrates multi-lingual, multi-modality image and reporting capabilities.

The Impax Cardiovascular (CV) suite, developed by Agfa HealthCare (Mortsel, Belgium), a leading provider of IT-enabled clinical workflow and diagnostic imaging systems, was presented at the European Society of Cardiology Congress 2007 in Vienna, Austria, in September 2007.

The suite supports improved productivity by providing fast and robust access to a consolidated view of all cross-modality cardiology and radiology images within a single review station. Built to satisfy the most demanding clinical workflow, Impax CV has innovative features, including tightly integrated structured reporting, vendor-neutrality, legacy equipment image management, and secure global access to diagnostic data.

The system provides an integrated view of patient data from a single point of access. This is ideal for multi-modality cardiology environments, where clinicians need to connect with information from a variety of imaging equipment components already in place. Among the modalities, cardiac catheterization, echocardiography, non-invasive vascular, endovascular, rhythmology, cardiac computed tomography (CT), electrophysiology, and stress electrocardiography (ECG) image and data management create a single integrated cardiovascular information system to meet the needs of hospitals and healthcare facilities worldwide. To further the integration of readily accessible cardiovascular patient data with improvements in clinical workflow, the patient-centric architecture supports Impax Scheduling, a system designed to optimize resource utilization.

The typical cardiology department can benefit from Impax CV due to its multi-lingual reporting platform that supports procedure reporting with natural language generation query and statistical analysis modules, and registry functionality for multiple European registries. Hospital administrators will find value in the system's integrated inventory management and the data mining and statistical analysis capabilities, developed to assist facilities in improving operating efficiencies.

With the vision of facilitating improved clinical workflow, the system is built on an open standards-based platform that facilitates interoperability between modalities to support patient-centric information sharing. The Impax platform, most notably structured information gathering and retrieval to support research and knowledge-building, as well as web technology provides the cardiologist with the ability to access images and develop or share reports from nearly anywhere in the world.


Related Links:
Agfa HealthCare