Westerly, Rhode Island, October 17, 2005 - Heartlab, an Agfa company, today announced that it has been awarded the 2005 Business Development Leadership Award by consultants Frost & Sullivan. The award recognizes Heartlab's ability to perceive and meet consumer needs by successfully developing and introducing products and services and to identify new market segments to expand the existing customer base.

"In the intensely competitive U.S. Cardiology PACS environment, Heartlab has consistently anticipated and met the needs of the marketplace," said Katherine Shariq, senior industry analyst at Frost & Sullivan. "Heartlab's rigorous and ongoing analysis of customer needs and its continuous development and adoption of state-of-the-art analytics, network, storage and IS integration solutions enables it to meet the future needs of its expanding customer base."

In addition, Frost & Sullivan's 2005 survey of the U.S. Cardiology PACS Market showed Heartlab as the third largest provider of Cardiology PACS solutions in the U.S. in 2004. With 17.8 percent for direct sales and 2.5 percent for indirect OEM sales (through its parent company, Agfa), Heartlab has increased its share of the $166 million U.S. market by more than eight percent from 2002, the last year that Frost & Sullivan surveyed the market. "As the market continues to evolve, Heartlab has emerged as the only viable modality independent solution provider for Cardiology information systems," said Robert Petrocelli, Heartlab's CEO. "As the market has revealed in other healthcare areas, there is a trend to consolidate until there are three or four potential suppliers of a given technology. Heartlab, now the cardiology business unit for Agfa's healthCare business group, is well positioned to grow market share beyond 20 percent in the U.S. and expand market share in other global markets. The cardiology market will continue to evolve worldwide, and the companies with small market shares will not survive."
Heartlab is the leading independent provider of Cardiology PACS in the Frost & Sullivan survey. Its systems support all vendor modalities, which means that cardiology departments are not locked into a single-vendor purchasing decision. Heartlab's information and image management systems are installed in more than 300 leading cardiology centers in the U.S. With the April 2005 acquisition of the company by Agfa, Heartlab will benefit from greater global resources and market reach, growing its customer base worldwide by integrating with existing Agfa installations and expanding into markets already served by Agfa's global business.

Established in 1994, Heartlab has consistently been recognized as one of America's fastest-growing private companies by Inc. magazine and ranked number 489 on Deloitte's ranking of the 500 fastest-growing technology companies in North America. Both organizations highlighted the company's revenue growth of more than 337 percent over the past five years and recognized its success in creating, promoting and installing its proprietary technology among an expanding customer base.

For more information, visit www.heartlab.com.

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