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Agfa HealthCare launches HYDMEDIA*, an enterprise content management system, in Canada

Integrated, flexible, vendor neutral solution enables digital archiving of paper-based and electronic documentation.

• Press release
• Mortsel, Belgium/Toronto, Canada
• May 10, 2012 04:00

Agfa HealthCare announces today that it is launching HYDMEDIA, its leading Electronic Content Management (ECM) system for healthcare organizations, to the Canadian market. HYDMEDIA is an IT solution that enables healthcare facilities to digitally archive healthcare information, including all paper-based documents, laboratory data, images and any kind of electronic documents, to provide a single view of the clinical and administrative record. All records are stored using a patient context and are therefore easily displayed within a case, visit, or via specialty or document type.

Agfa HealthCare's HYDMEDIA is based on common Healthcare IT standards (HL7), which make its deployment and integration easier. It is an essential technology that can not only share clinical data, but all hospital information such as financial and HR documents. And because it is vendor-neutral, the system can be embedded into 3rd party applications. Furthermore, HYDMEDIA can be integrated with other IT systems via standard IT interfaces, such as web services.

"Having a cost effective and reliable archiving solution that also enables quick access of critical medical records as well as important hospital documents is key to any facility's operations," said Andy Hind, Vice President, Agfa HealthCare, Canada. "Agfa HealthCare is pleased to be bringing our advanced enterprise content management system to the Canadian market so that healthcare facilities can benefit from efficient archiving, reliable recovery and reduced physical storage space."

Healthcare remains one of the most document intensive industries. Tens of millions of pages, along with associated attachments, are created and often stored across multiple buildings or sites. By digitizing and integrating these archives directly into the Hospital Information Systems (HIS) via HYDMEDIA, healthcare organizations are able to reduce the space and expense needed to store such information. This also allows hospitals to realize a faster return on investment, by reducing the amount of storage space and printing required.

Digitization and integration into the HIS further enables administrators and clinicians to simultaneously retrieve and access these documents quickly and directly from their HIS workspace, via a single and easy to use interface. Enterprise-wide content management solutions help make data recovery possible in case of a disaster, securing critical information that would normally have been lost in paper format. Moreover, HYDMEDIA centrally archives scanned documents together with electronic documents, providing a single view of the complete archived patient record.

Since its addition to the Agfa HealthCare enterprise informatics portfolio, HYDMEDIA has been in use in over 350 hospital locations across Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Luxembourg, France and the UK. HYDMEDIA is offered in conjunction with the company's leading image management and storage solution IMPAX Data Center or as a stand-alone solution. The system has been developed to support and enhance hospital information management on all levels, such as Electronic Patient Record (EPR) systems, Clinical, Laboratory and Radiology Information Systems (CIS/LIS/RIS), as well as patient, administrative and financial information.

HYDMEDIA is developed to maintain the integrity of the scanned documents and enables access to these archived documents by multiple users, spread over different locations, at the same time.

* Note: HYDMEDIA is not available in the U.S.