Agfa HealthCare, a leading provider of diagnostic imaging and healthcare IT solutions, announced today it has successfully connected all 37 member sites of Hospital Diagnostic Imaging Repository Services (HDIRS) in Ontario, Canada, giving them the ability to view all diagnostic images and reports through the deployment of IMPAX Data Center and enterprise viewing technology. Serving more than 30 percent of Ontario's population, HDIRS member sites are now able to view the more than seven million exams available to be shared, and growing at a rate of more than 2.8 million exams each year.

Improved access to vital health information

"The HDIRS project is one of the most complex in Canada, both in terms of the quantity of clinical professionals and patients served, and we are pleased to be able to work with them toward the goal of dramatically improving access to vital health information," said Andy Hind, Vice President, Agfa HealthCare Canada. "HDIRS' member facilities benefit from standards-based interoperability, data synchronization and fast access to the complete imaging patient record which will ultimately streamline workflow and enhance the delivery of patient care."
Data sharing among members

IMPAX Data Center is a scalable and fault tolerant enterprise medical imaging repository solution designed to store clinical DICOM data objects, including DICOM encapsulated non-imaging objects such as waveforms, structured reports and PDFs. Using Agfa HealthCare's IMPAX Data Center, HDIRS is able to consolidate the information stored in disparate clinical information systems and picture archiving and communication systems (PACS) so that all imaging studies can be accessed. Vendor agnostic, it fully integrates with the individual hospital's diagnostic imaging repositories into a unified repository, allowing the physicians across HDIRS to access all exams as published to the image repository by any vendor.

"Agfa HealthCare's stable, reliable and interoperable solutions have been able to provide a vital functionality to facilitate data sharing among our members, which is of the utmost importance in our multi-vendor environment," said Pat Ryan, General Manager, HDIRS. "The technology also provides a platform that is scalable, which supports our common goal of the future sharing of diagnostic images across the province of Ontario."

Reducing operational costs

Another added benefit of the solution created through the use of IMPAX Data Center is the ability for individual hospitals and healthcare facilities to eliminate hosting of their long term medical imaging archives within their own system. By freeing the space previously held by these data intensive files, hospitals can reduce on-going operational costs as well as use that space for other archiving purposes.

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