AGFA HealthCare collaborates with the clinical community and imaging standards committees to demonstrate Enterprise Imaging excellence.

Interoperability is at the heart of our Enterprise Imaging platform, unifying imaging across the enterprise to break down silos and enable seamless communication. To reach this level of efficiency, AGFA’s Research & Development teams continuously align, develop and test with leading standards to keep  our platform future-ready, compatible and vendor neutral.

A key moment in this alignment is the IHE Connectathon. This is an open testing event where healthcare vendors can test their solutions for interoperability strength and compliance against IHE (Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise) standards, all within a fast-paced, collaborative and supervised environment. Hosted each year by the IHE International organization, the event enables the clinical community to test and facilitate common standards in information-sharing – ensuring that clinical data is usable whenever and wherever it is needed. With three international IHE Connectathons taking place year in Europe, North America and Asia this event is a key milestone for software developers.

Taking place in AGFA’s home country of Belgium, the IHE-Europe Connectathon 2026 celebrates its 25^th anniversary this week. As a one of the most formal interoperability testing events, it has seen more than 1000 systems tested so far; the solutions successfully tested during the event receive the IHE Connectathon Seal – an accreditation received by AGFA’s Enterprise Imaging platform in previous years, and with the same objective for 2026.

Dan Brown, Chief Technology Officer for AGFA HealthCare comments:

“At AGFA HealthCare, we are a standards-first company because we are a user-first company.  Our mission is to empower the care provider to operate at the top of their license which often requires them to have information that originates from many places in the healthcare eco-system. We utilize vendor-neutral standards to integrate instead of a closed environment, driving efficiency and quality of the delivery of patient care.

Connectathon achieves standardized interoperability between systems. For AGFA HealthCare, it’s a fitting forum to demonstrate that AGFA’s Enterprise Imaging Platform works together with other systems in the enterprise, with over 60 vendors in one room, testing over 70 different systems to common standards. It’s an exciting week for us.”

IHE International is an initiative between the healthcare users, such as hospitals, and professional IT bodies, such as RSNA, HIMSS, SFR, Interop’ Santé, Agoria, and the NHS, standards development organizations, such as the National Institute of Standards & Technology and Health Level 7 Inc., and software vendors. Spread over a one-week in-person testing event, Connectathon also offers subsidiary programmes to offer controlled, supervised and neutral environments to support software development – from initial prototypes at the Plugathon, to trending technical sessions at the Experience Days, to testing functional specifications related to the Image Sharing aspect of EHDS (European Health Data Space) at the XT-EHR Projectathon. For this particular track, AGFA HealthCare’s Enterprise Imaging will collaborate with its customer and huge Belgian hospital,  UZ Leuven.

With multiple healthcare solutions applying for the same IHE profiles and complementary actors, and expert guidance from the IHE, DICOM® and HL7® committees, the Connectathon week is important – a vital step to ensuring that our customers’ imaging environments are empowered; staying connected, current, and ready for what’s next.

We look forward to an enriching, and successful Connectathon in Brussels. Let’s get empowered with technology!

Want to discover more about the interoperability properties of Enterprise Imaging? Find out more here: https://www.agfahealthcare.com/interoperability/

You can read more about the IHE Connectathon here: https://connectathon.ihe-europe.net/