Agfa HealthCare demonstrated at RSNA 2006 in Chicago its IMPAX Data Center that will provide large-scale multimedia storage of all types of medical images and diagnostic results for hospital groups, regional healthcare organizations and national medical archives. IMPAX Data Center is designed to meet the needs of new technologies such as multi-slice CT and helps extend PACS into other image-intensive clinical departments, including cardiology and orthopedics. Agfa HealthCare’s IMPAX Data Center consolidates information in a central clinical data foundation to provide comprehensive data at the point of patient care. IMPAX Data Center takes multimedia information that will support the EHR and puts it all into one infrastructure. The Data Center goes beyond today’s offering of one integrated solution for radiology and cardiology. It extends to orthopedics, endoscopy, pathology and other departments that generate standards-based images, video, audio wave forms, visible light objects, clinical structured reports, test results and other clinical data. Agfa HealthCare’s IMPAX Data Center can receive hundreds of images per second, a valuable resource in a world where 64-slice CT scanning is fast becoming a standard of care. It has the ability to manage millions of exams and petabytes (approximately 1,000 terabytes) of information.

“The sheer number and size of images that have to be stored have exploded, resulting in the need for a new architecture to help health organizations keep up with the imaging demand,” said Don Dennison, global PACS product line manager. “IMPAX Data Center is Agfa’s next-generation technology that takes PACS archiving out of radiology and into the realm of a multimedia clinical data center that will support the EHR.” Agfa’s IMPAX Data Center meets with DICOM standards and IHE integration profiles. It also incorporates IHE for all applicable radiology, cardiology and IT infrastructure integration profiles delivery of patient care.

Agfa demonstrated XDS-I (Cross-enterprise Document Sharing for Imaging) at its booth and the TCE (Teaching File and Clinical Trial Export) integration profile in the central IHE demonstration area. Due to its adherence to standards, the IMPAX Data Center can be part of any existing or new Agfa HealthCare PACS or exist in legacy or multi-vendor environments, further increasing data sharing and even disaster recovery.