San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center (SFGH) has selected Agfa HealthCare for its Imaging Clinical Information System solution based on its IMPAX Data Center Suite of imaging management applications.

IMPAX Data Center enables collection of patient imaging data from multiple specialties into a unified, tightly integrated and centrally managed system. It serves a key role in creating a longitudinal image-enabled electronic health record (EHR).

One imaging record for the entire facility

The decision to select Agfa HealthCare for the hospital's next generation enterprise image management solution was based, in part, on the success of Agfa HealthCare's radiology department PACS. The new solution will support the main hospital, emergency department and Level 1 trauma center, as well as 14 clinics throughout the greater San Francisco metropolitan area. Nearly 2,000 physicians from the University of California, San Francisco work at the hospital along with employees from the San Francisco Department of Public Health.

"Our administration decided two years ago that we wanted to move to a single imaging record for the entire facility," says RJ Merck, Radiology Supervisor, SFGH. "Over the last seven years, Agfa HealthCare has provided everything they said they would with their radiology PACS, including a well-maintained system with amazing, consistent uptime. Based on our prior success, we decided to expand our relationship with Agfa HealthCare."

Single system with global approach

One key benefit of IMPAX Data Center is that all clinicians-including referring physicians-have access to the full imaging patient record. Clinicians can seamlessly share images and consult on patient information, although permissions vary depending on the clinician's role. For example, referring physicians have access to view images and information, while radiologists have the additional ability to annotate images, dictate and sign reports. Merck also notes that
Agfa HealthCare does not attach proprietary tags to the DICOM data, which was another factor in the decision to stay with the company.

"We like the fact that this is a single system with a global approach," adds Merck.

IMPAX Data Center provides a fully redundant disaster recovery solution with servers housed in two separate locations. It is also scalable to meet the growing demands of imaging data, including multi-slice CT and high-field MRI. Additionally, the hospital has a single EMR for all reports and the single imaging repository will further simplify access to patient data. According to Merck, at any one time more than 80 clinicians within the hospital will be accessing images from IMPAX Data Center.