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Agfa HealthCare now offers turnkey migration services, enabling healthcare facilities to move legacy cardiology imaging data to a current platform

New agreement with DataFirst will deliver automated migration services for cardiology, significantly increasing efficiency and quality of migration process

• Press release
• Mortsel, Belgium/Greenville, SC
• March 13, 2012 04:00

(ACC 2012, Booth #12055, Chicago, IL) Agfa HealthCare today announced a new agreement with DataFirst, a solutions-based software engineering firm based in Raleigh, NC. The companies will be providing unique data migration service capabilities and archival storage solutions, enabling healthcare facilities to benefit from a very rapid data migration process from aged media and end of life archive devices.

Cardiology data migration often places a substantial demand on legacy technology (i.e. jukebox technology, DVD, MOD, etc.) as well as the often limited IT resource pool in today's hospital environment. Risks include failure to migrate due to legacy technology obsolescence, resulting in clinical downtime, costly service calls, and indefinite or permanent migration failure. Utilizing DataFirst's Hyper-Migration solution, Agfa HealthCare can significantly speed the process for facilities in contrast to standard DICOM query migrations. Now a large migration can be fully complete in days, making patient information available when and where it is needed. This complete, seamless and rapid realignment of data storage is done on the back end without an impact to the clinical workflow, while meeting the current and future business and clinical needs of the facility.

"Agfa HealthCare is changing the game in data migration by providing facilities with a better alternative that can significantly improve the efficiency and quality of data migration from what was often measured in months and years to weeks and days," said Charles Wickens, Global General Manager, Cardiovascular Business, Agfa HealthCare. "By simplifying the migration progress with a modern alternative, Agfa HealthCare and DataFirst are enabling healthcare facilities to enhance their clinical capabilities by not only having quick online access to necessary data, but by also enabling them to more easily upgrade or switch to a newer software system."

"We are extremely pleased to begin this relationship with one of the premier providers of healthcare IT solutions," said Jake Berg, CEO of DataFirst Corporation. "DataFirst's migration technology is the perfect complement to Agfa HealthCare's cardiology solutions. By incorporating Hyper-Migration strategies for new and existing Agfa HealthCare customers, DataFirst eliminates the challenges associated with conventional migration tactics."

In addition to providing migration services, Agfa HealthCare will also provide end-to-end support, upgrading the archive hardware to fully-supported, industry standard technology, eliminating obsolete media, and improving archive performance, ultimately resulting in improved efficiencies. Also unique to Agfa HealthCare's solution is that although data migration is primarily focused on just cardiology imaging data, now non-imaging data sets like HL-7 reports can be migrated as well.