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Dell has announced it will host Agfa Healthcare's medical imagingarchive in the cloud. The cloud will provide the storage capacity and processing power asdoctors look for ways to make medical images compatible withelectronic health records (EHRs). Cloud computing will be an essential factor in this effort,especially when IT budgets are tight, according to Dr. JamieCoffin, vice president and general manager of Dell Healthcare andLife Sciences. "The world is moving to a patient-centric view of the[EHR]," Coffin told eWEEK. "You have to start to think about digital radiology,pathology, genomics and figure out how to store this in a formatwhere you take and use it wherever your clinician is." Agfa's medical imaging archive, called Imaging Clinical InformationSystem (ICIS), is a central repository that allows doctors tocapture, store and exchange medical images. Using ICIS in Dell's cloud, clinicians can capture a medical imageand related metadata and "marry" it with the patientdemographics in an EHR, Lenny Reznik, director of enterpriseimaging and information solutions for Agfa HealthCare, told eWEEK. "Their clinical information system allows you to image-enableall of the data that they have in their [picture archiving andcommunications systems, or PACS] into the [EHR]," said Coffin."The idea is that they store it in the cloud, and customerscan access it from wherever they are and whatever platform they'reon." Dell and Agfa announced their partnership on June 7. ICIS incorporates the Impax Data Center, which unifies patientrecords across regions, hospital facilities and departments. As avendor-neutral system, ICIS can store images from various PACS. The Agfa platform also includes the Xero Technology Viewer, a toolthat allows doctors to stream the images from any Web-enableddevice. The image viewer lets doctors embed images directly into anEHR. Agfa customers will be able to access images either in Agfa's ICISor Dell's Cloud Clinical Archive, said Coffin. Dell announced a similar agreement with Siemens in February in which the two companies would collaborate on avendor-neutral image archive in the cloud. In addition, Dell will offer its Cloud Clinical Recovery platformto Agfa customers to provide disaster protection. Medicalfacilities using Agfa's imaging archive will be able to accessadditional analytics and data services in the future, said Coffin. Hospitals with 300 to 400 beds that can't afford a data centerinfrastructure or the personnel to operate it will be able tomanage their images and data in the cloud, said Coffin. "By the year 2015, half of all medical images will be in thecloud," Reznik predicted. By allowing ICIS to manage the archiving of radiology images,doctors are free to concentrate on treating patients, according toAgfa. Storing images in the cloud allows providers to trackpatients over time and maintain longitudinal medical imaging recordaccess, Michael Green, Agfa HealthCare's president and CEO ofAmericas region, said in a statement. Storing the medical images in the cloud will allow doctors' officesor medical centers to manage data-intensive images when they lackphysical space to store their own servers. "A single pathology slide can be like 6GB of data because it'sa high-resolution image," Coffin noted. "It really bringsan ROI to the customers they've never been able to get before[from] on-site image management." In addition, archiving medical images in the cloud allows healthcare providers to meet the Stage 2 requirements on meaningful use of EHRs , according to Dell. Medical image viewing is an optional menu measure for achievingStage 2 compliance. As health information exchanges (HIEs) continue to connect data from diverse EHR platforms, the cloudwill be an important foundation as data elements such as imaging,pathology and genomics are incorporated into the exchanges, Coffinsuggested. We are high quality suppliers, our products such as China Medical Wound Dressing , Wound Plaster Dressing for oversee buyer. To know more, please visits Pain Relief Sleeve.
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