Agfa HealthCare and Orion Health form global strategic relationship for e-Health

- Companies team up, combining their enterprise imaging and EHR/HIE expertise, to provide cost-effective health record consolidation and exchange across enterprises.
- Agfa HealthCare extends reach of its ICIS (Imaging Clinical Information Services) platform to provide a secure 'single patient view' of data across all clinical applications including the longitudinal imaging record and enhances its ORBIS* HIS/CIS/EPR platform with new capabilities for regional collaboration.
- The combined solution creates workflow efficiencies, providing images in context with patient information, and delivering more comprehensive information for care decisions.

Agfa HealthCare, a global leader in enterprise imaging and clinical workflow solutions, and Orion Health, a global leader in health information exchange (HIE) and healthcare integration solutions, announced today a global strategic relationship to image-enable Electronic Health Records (EHRs), and HIEs and for regional-enabled Hospital Information Systems/Clinical Information Systems/ Electronic Patient Records (HIS/CISs/EPRs) that will provide cost-effective e-health deployments across hospitals, health systems, regions, and nation states, and to help these entities achieve healthcare reform and improve care quality and delivery.

Image-enabled Electronic Health Records

As healthcare facilities are expanding their EHR systems to include all patient data and meet Meaningful Use requirements, and as HIE projects are more rapidly deploying, images from Agfa HealthCare's Imaging Clinical Information Services (ICIS) platform can now be readily integrated into a shared 'single best view' of the patient via Orion Health Clinical Portal. Multi-disciplinary imaging data will now be available in context with other patient data and documents drawn from multiple systems across a hospital network or health region. By bringing images into this unified view of the patient, significant efficiencies can be realized, including: timely decision support and hence, treatment start, reductions in costs of repeat exam reads and duplicate test orders.

"Today imaging makes up a significant percentage of health data, and Agfa HealthCare's ICIS platform offers comprehensive management of images regardless of where the images were created or are stored," said Ian McCrae, CEO of Orion Health. "Bringing this wealth of diagnostic and clinical image data from Agfa HealthCare's ICIS platform into Orion Health's EHR or HIE will support more informed decision making and collaboration for clinicians, while managing costs for health providers."

Leaders in the deployment of large-scale, regionalized e-health solutions, the vendors are leveraging their collective experiences and expertise to provide facilities with complete image access without boundaries. Agfa HealthCare, a leading provider of IT-enabled clinical workflow and diagnostic image management solutions, will provide Orion Health's integrated EHR/HIE solution as part of their enterprise imaging solution. Orion Health, global provider of regional and nationwide EHRs/HIEs, will offer Agfa HealthCare's ICIS platform primarily consisting of IMPAX Data Center and the XERO web-based image viewer.

In addition to clinician benefits, the solution also benefits patients. With patient engagement increasingly being a core strategy for better care, where appropriate, patients and their families and personal care support teams will also be able to securely access a unified view of their electronic record including the entire longitudinal imaging record via Orion Health Patient Portal.

Telling a richer story

One of the first joint customers for Agfa HealthCare and Orion Health is the Canadian province of Alberta. The Alberta Health Services comprehensive solution integrates 123 hospitals and 85 clinics with 37,000 clinical users providing healthcare to 3.8 million Albertans. AHS's mission is to provide a patient-focused, quality health system that is accessible and sustainable for all Albertans.

Supporting extension of Agfa HealthCare's ORBIS HIS/CIS/EPR across regions/networks and into the referring community

While their relationship has global scope, Agfa HealthCare and Orion Health will initially concentrate their joint offering on selected geographies in developed health markets, where economies of scale can bring the most benefit via cost savings and improved healthcare delivery. In the U.S. and Canada, the focus will be on adding the clinical depth into the ICIS solution, while in France, Belgium and the UK, the focus will be on adding regional collaboration capabilities into the ORBIS HIS/CIS/EPR and the IT imaging solutions.

Luc Thijs, President of Agfa HealthCare, commented: "Hospitals globally are extending their range of interactions with their patients and with the referring communities in the regions they serve. Our relationship with Orion Health allows for patients to participate in their care, for community-based healthcare providers to have secure, role-appropriate access to the most useful parts of their patients' hospital records and for regional care teams to be coordinated over chronic disease programs."

*ORBIS is not available in Canada or the US