Agfa HealthCare announces its successful participation in the IHE (Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise) initiative's 13th European Connectathon in Istanbul, Turkey. The event tests the integration capabilities of hospital information systems (HIS), picture archiving and communication systems (PACS) and other healthcare solutions in a controlled environment.
Meeting demands for regional electronic patient files
"We took part in 7 integration profiles with 11 IHE Actors with our current software version, and successfully proved the interoperability of ORBIS," explains Michael Strüter, Director and Sales Manager DACH for Agfa HealthCare. IHE Actors are information systems or applications that produce, manage or act on information associated with operational activities in the enterprise. Each actor supports a specific set of IHE transactions.
Strüter continues, "We were very pleased to have improved our performance over last year. We also established our ability to meet the demands of the electronic patient file for Austria (ELGA) and the electronic case file for Germany (EFA). In addition to ORBIS, we tested our HYDMedia enterprise content management system for the first time, and demonstrated its interoperability. And with the IMPAX EE, we could further improve the number of tested IHE integration profiles. All-in-all, these results support the success of our efforts to standardize system gateways and motivate us to look forward to the next Connectathon."
Improving the information exchange of workflows
The IHE Connectathon is an annual event held in North America, Asia and Europe. At the IHE-Europe Connectathon in Istanbul, 64 companies tested the interoperability of more than 80 information systems in over 3,000 tests. The IHE initiative is driven by doctors, administrators, IT, experts and industry vendors on the one side, and organizations like HIMMS, RSNA, etc. on the other.
IHE has regional organizations in several countries, including USA, Canada, Germany, France, Italy, the UK, Austria and Switzerland. Its main objective is to improve the information exchange of standardized workflows between IT systems in healthcare, based on accepted standards like DICOM and HL7. The resulting integration profiles provide a reference for the interoperability of solutions and can be used by customers and in tenders.
- 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.