Major hospital IT and picture archiving and communications project underscores leading position of Agfa HealthCare

Sep 12 2007

Agfa HealthCare, a leading provider of IT-enabled clinical workflow and diagnostic imaging solutions, announces today that it has successfully installed its ORBIS Hospital Information System (HIS) together with its Picture Archiving and Communications system (PACS) IMPAX in the Salzburger Landeskliniken (SALK) in Austria.

ORBIS is now operational after 18 months of preparation and serves 350 organizational units within the facility, including hospital wards, outpatient units, operating theaters, and specialist departments. In total 600,000 patient records and findings have been successfully and securely migrated to the new solution. The Salzburger Landeskliniken is the main hospital group in the Salzburg region, counting over half a million ambulatory visits each year, and employing 4,900 staff members.

Agfa HealthCare's ORBIS replaces a heterogeneous system landscape in the Salzburger Landeskliniken, and it makes patient data available at all times so that the data can be comprehensively and continuously communicated, documented and evaluated. In two departments alone - Discharge Report Compilation and Diagnostic Evaluation - the introduction of ORBIS has led to a reduction of the number of standard forms from 650 to 50. The multi-stage introductory process, devised by the so-called SALKIS project team together with Agfa HealthCare, provides for the integration of all key functional units, including the laboratories and numerous subsystems. It also provides for the transition to digital documentation updating over the next two years. The basic availability of all pivotal functions has already been assured in the implementation stage which has now been completed.

As part of the large-scale project, a number of medical imaging workstations and imaging systems have been integrated into the Agfa HealthCare HIS. Training courses were provided for all relevant members of hospital personnel. Each day, the SALK ORBIS system processes a data volume of 30,000 MB - roughly the equivalent of 8.4 million A4-format pages.

Following a Europe-wide call for bids, the Salzburger Landeskliniken opted for an Agfa HealthCare end-to-end IT-solution at the beginning of 2006. "We have selected Agfa HealthCare's solutions on the basis of three key factors: firstly its holistic, process-based product approach, secondly, the outstanding user-friendliness of the user interface, and finally the positive experience reported by a number of hospitals using ORBIS, which the SALK had consulted," SALK Managing Director Dr. Max Laimböck states.

He continues: "With the introduction of the new Hospital Information System, the SALK has passed a major milestone on the road to establishing itself as a state-of-the-art, process-oriented healthcare organization." Marcus Theis, the HIS/PACS Project Manager adds: "A project of this magnitude represents an immense challenge for all the parties involved. We are extremely grateful for the excellent collaboration with our personnel in the various hospital departments as well as with our partners at Agfa HealthCare."

Andrea Fiumicelli, Executive Vice President Agfa HealthCare, comments: "We would like to congratulate the SALK team and our own personnel on the excellent, on-time realization of this large and challenging project. We have again demonstrated that when major organizations in the healthcare sector require a reliable provider of workflow and imaging systems for hospitals or clinics, they need to look no further than the market-leading solutions of Agfa HealthCare."

With its four hospitals the Salzburger Landeskliniken cater for the entire federal state of Salzburg and are also the state's largest employer with around 4,900 employees on their payroll. Since the beginning of 2007 the Landeskrankenhaus and the Christian-Doppler-Klinik have officially been appointed the status of the University Clinic Salzburg as part of the Paracelsus Medical Private University. Therefore, the University Clinic Salzburg is next to a leading hospital and research facility also a teaching institution for medical studies.

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