Agfa HealthCare announces that it is now providing a new off-site managed services solution to the Orbis Medical Center in Sittard-Geleen, the Netherlands. Under this agreement, Agfa HealthCare is delivering its IMPAX Picture Archiving and Communication System/Radiology Information System (PACS/RIS) and long-term image archiving as a service out of two data centers, as of end February 2012.
A multimodality, multi-department environment
The 570-bed Orbis Medical Center, in the south-east of the Netherlands, serves not only the 200,000 inhabitants of the neighboring Dutch municipalities, but also attracts patients from nearby Belgian and German areas. In all, it carries out some 170,000 radiology exams each year, using 23 different modalities, including X-ray, CR, CT, MRI and Ultrasound. These also connect to over 60 other modalities throughout the hospital, including gamma cameras, photo cameras, microscopes, endoscopes, etc., providing another 60,000 exams per year.
Full access to functionalities
Since 2006, the Orbis Medical Center used a third-party IT provider to host its Agfa HealthCare IMPAX PACS/RIS as a Solution as a Service (SaaS). Now, Agfa HealthCare is providing the SaaS itself, out of two data centers: in Aalsmeer, the Netherlands, and Agfa HealthCare's headquarters in Antwerp, Belgium.
With Agfa HealthCare's SaaS, a hospital has access to all the functionalities of an on-site or off-site Agfa HealthCare solution without any capital expenditure. Agfa HealthCare provides full management and operations, and selects the best choice for the housing and telecom partners.
Under the agreement with Orbis Medical Center, Agfa HealthCare handles the service level management, application management, system management and administration, infrastructure (servers, storage, etc.) and application provisioning, data center provisioning and telecom infrastructure.
Made-to-order SaaS solution
The installations are comprised of two VMware clusters with a fully redundant failover infrastructure. Private telecom lines of 1 Gbps from Dutch telecom operator KPN are used as data lines. These are configured as a triangle between the hospital location and the two data centers, for more redundancy.
Long-term archiving will be handled by an IMPAX Data Center image archive, also based on SaaS. A service level agreement should guarantee the 24/7/365 availability of the solutions.
"We are very pleased to take this further step in our long-standing relationship with Orbis Medical Center," says Ron Van Zonneveld, Country Manager NL, Agfa HealthCare. "We consulted closely with the hospital to determine the best Managed Services model for them. Agfa HealthCare's SaaS solution manages both radiological and non-radiological images and that shows we deliver what we promised: a SaaS for complete Medical Image Management."
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- Agfa HealthCare's Profile
About Agfa
The Agfa-Gevaert Group is one of the world's leading companies in imaging and information technology. Agfa develops manufactures and markets analogue and digital systems for the printing industry (Agfa Graphics), for the healthcare sector (Agfa HealthCare), and for specific industrial applications (Agfa Materials). Agfa is headquartered in Mortsel, Belgium. The company is present in 40 countries and has agents in another 100 countries around the globe. The Agfa-Gevaert Group achieved a turnover of 2,948 million euro in 2010.
About Agfa HealthCare
Agfa HealthCare, a member of the Agfa-Gevaert Group, is a leading global provider of diagnostic imaging and healthcare IT solutions. The company has nearly a century of healthcare experience and has been a pioneer on the healthcare IT market since the early 1990's. Today Agfa HealthCare designs, develops and delivers state-of-the-art systems for capturing, managing and processing diagnostic images and clinical/administrative information for hospitals and healthcare facilities, as well as contrast media solutions to enable effective medical imaging results. The company has sales offices and agents in over 100 markets worldwide. Sales for Agfa HealthCare in 2010 were 1,180 million euro.