Agfa Healthcare Enhances IMPAX Business Intelligence Solution With Launch Of Meaningful Use Dashboard

Addition of new capabilities further bolster product performance and help hospitals achieve requirements for MU reimbursement

• New tools allow healthcare facilities to benchmark and easily report on requirements established for Meaningful Use.
• Meaningful Use dashboard monitors nine thresholds for compliance with customizable color coding and reporting functions.
• Complete IMPAX Business Intelligence solution successfully enhancing efficiency, improving the patient experience and helping meet regulatory requirements at OHSU.

(RSNA 2011, Booth #8350) Agfa HealthCare announces recently the addition of a Meaningful Use dashboard to the IMPAX Business Intelligence solution. Unlike many other systems, IMPAX Business Intelligence contributes to demonstrating Meaningful Use of clinical data through its ability to actively monitor the thresholds outlined in Stage 1, and readily report on them through the IMPAX RIS solution.

"Agfa HealthCare recognizes that for business intelligence systems to be truly effective and valuable for healthcare facilities, they have to monitor and report on the information that can directly and positively influence their operations and bottom line," said Lenny J. Reznik, Director of Enterprise Imaging and Information, Agfa HealthCare, U.S. " That's why we've worked with our customers to enhance IMPAX Business Intelligence to give them the tools that they need to achieve results today."

New functionality available with IMPAX Business Intelligence provides metrics on processes and workflow, and uses dashboards to capture and illustrate health data and potential outcomes, as defined by Meaningful Use requirements. The indicators are all customizable, with green, yellow and red bars that notify the user of how close they are to achieving compliance in each area. Among the thresholds that facilities can select to monitor are the following:

• Demographic collection on 50 percent of all unique patients with individual monitoring on patient preferred language, gender, race, ethnicity, and date of birth
• Recording of vital signs on 50 percent of all unique patients with individual monitoring on patients between the ages of 2 - 20 for height, weight, blood pressure, and BMI
• Growth chart plotting for patients between the ages of 2 - 20 for both height and weight against national statistics
• Recording of smoking status on 50 percent of all unique patients ages 13 and above

Meeting regulatory demands and meaningful use standards
Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU), Portland, has been using IMPAX Business Intelligence to enhance efficiency and to improve the patient experience and benchmark data. The system delivers measures that highlight opportunities to save costs, and is designed to help managers proactively improve data quality and data integrity over time. OHSU is now among the first healthcare systems in the U.S. to implement the Meaningful Use dashboard for meeting regulatory criteria and Meaningful Use standards.

"Working with Agfa HealthCare we've been able to gather and organize data into a format that we can actually use and learn from," Erwin Schwarz, Director of Imaging Services, OHSU. "In the midst of many new regulatory demands including Meaningful Use criteria, as well as at a time when we're facing cuts in radiology departments, using an analytical tool such as IMPAX Business Intelligence has allowed us to optimize clinical, business and administrative data and hone in on where we need to improve. We can see what we are doing well, benchmark our data against other institutions, and achieve a higher level of patient and referring physician satisfaction."

Optimize data to enhance workflow and increase satisfaction
IMPAX Business Intelligence is part of Agfa HealthCare's advanced RIS and PACS offering, and provides historical, current and predictive views of radiology operations in the form of real-time dashboards, management reports, and adhoc queries against an IMPAX data warehouse in a single browser window. The solution enables healthcare providers to compile, organize and manage clinical, quality, financial and administrative data. It can also enhance efficiency and competitiveness, as well as allow administrators to analyze the workflow in order to achieve greater patient and physician satisfaction. For example, the solution can be used to decrease patient wait times by zeroing in on where the workflow is inhibiting the patient flow. Additionally, facilities can monitor physician ordering to identify trends and assist in marketing efforts to the referring base.

"In developing IMPAX Business Intelligence, we had customer input before we built the product," said Reznik. "We're pleased to be able to continue working with OHSU in further developing the solution with the capability of combining both the PACS and RIS data together, giving a true patient image of what occurred from end-to-end and allowing healthcare professionals to provide more efficient care and meet the ever increasing regulatory demands."

Visit Agfa HealthCare at RSNA 2011, Booth #8350.

To schedule a demonstration or to speak with a product expert, please contact salesinfo@agfa.com or visit www.agfahealthcare.com.

About Agfa
The Agfa-Gevaert Group is one of the world's leading companies in imaging and information technology. Agfa develops manufactures and markets analogue and digital systems for the printing industry (Agfa Graphics), for the healthcare sector (Agfa HealthCare), and for specific industrial applications (Agfa Materials). Agfa is headquartered in Mortsel, Belgium. The company is present in 40 countries and has agents in another 100 countries around the globe. The Agfa-Gevaert Group achieved a turnover of 2,948 million euro in 2010.

About Agfa HealthCare
Agfa HealthCare, a member of the Agfa-Gevaert Group, is a leading global provider of diagnostic imaging and healthcare IT solutions. The company has nearly a century of healthcare experience and has been a pioneer on the healthcare IT market since the early 1990's. Today Agfa HealthCare designs, develops and delivers state-of-the-art systems for capturing, managing and processing diagnostic images and clinical/administrative information for hospitals and healthcare facilities, as well as contrast media solutions to enable effective medical imaging results. The company has sales offices and agents in over 100 markets worldwide. Sales for Agfa HealthCare in 2010 were 1,180 million euro. For more information, visit www.agfahealthcare.com or the Agfa HealthCare Blog.

SOURCE: Agfa HealthCare