Technology giant Dell and Agfa HealthCare, an interoperable IT and imaging systems provider, announced a partnership to integrate Agfa’s imaging clinical information system (ICIS) platform with Dell Drive Plus to offer medical image management within an Epic or other electronic health record (EHR).
Highlighted in conjunction with the HIMSS14 conference, the collaboration is part of Agfa’s and Dell’s focus to streamline customer workflows by providing integrated enhancements for EHRs, including access to medical images within a patient’s electronic health record.
Agfa HealthCare’s ICIS solution is a comprehensive platform for enterprise imaging management that delivers a workflow-centric platform to make multispecialty image data available to physicians across the continuum of care.
The model supports the potential clinical and resource benefits of images that are provided by the patient-centric presentation of an EHR, the company said.
ICIS allows for images and data from multiple medical imaging applications as well as non-medical imaging applications to be consolidated into one single view, heightening the value of the EHR.
“Dell’s reliable infrastructure and secure cloud technology and long-standing positive relationship with Agfa HealthCare made the company an ideal cloud provider to demonstrate the value of ICIS solutions and advance the visual health care evolution,” Lenny J. Reznik, director of enterprise imaging and information solutions at Agfa HealthCare North America, said in a statement. “With this collaboration, hospitals and health systems can achieve significant clinical workflow and patient care benefits, as well as operational and cost efficiencies, because all patient documents and images are now integrated and accessible from a single, cloud-based EHR system.”
Dell Drive Plus integrates health care IT technologies and optimizes the solutions on Dell open-source platforms with the aim of making the deployment and optimization of EHRs easier and more cost effective.
In doing so, the platform can help customers expand their digital health care infrastructure to include a larger ecosystem of applications while eliminating the challenges of selecting, negotiating, integrating and deploying these solutions together.
“Agfa HealthCare’s robust ICIS platform empowers Dell Drive Plus with the highly important element of medical image management,” August Calhoun, vice president and general manager of Dell Healthcare and Life Sciences, said in a statement. “This not only helps to reduce costs, but also enhances patient care by improving clinician accessibility to the full scope of patient information.”
During HIMSS14, Agfa HealthCare is showcasing its vision for advancing universal image and data sharing throughout the health enterprise.
Several major enhancements to the ICIS platform have been launched, including ICIS Transfer, which provides CD import and Web transfer of Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) images, allowing reduction of foreign study management costs.
Also making a debut is ICIS Vivid, ICIS’ Web and mobile-device image capture technology. Vivid allows physicians on the move to capture metadata-rich medical images and automatically attach these images to the correct medical record.