September 2, 2016 — The University of Mississippi Medical Center (UMMC) recently signed an agreement to build its imaging management strategy on Agfa Healthcare’s Enterprise Imaging platform.
UMMC will implement a comprehensive suite of software solutions from the platform, allowing the health system to consolidate medical images, hardware and storage, and enable clinicians to share access and visualize imaging data, no matter where they physically practice medicine. This functionality helps create an image-enhanced patient record that supports clinician decision-making, and sets the stage to better quality and value-based healthcare.
UMMC sought to upgrade and enhance a variety of medical imaging applications and functions across its five hospitals and related physician practices. After carefully researching product offerings and interoperability capabilities, UMMC determined that Agfa's Enterprise Imaging platform would become the foundation for an imaging strategy that not merely captures images, but makes those images a true organizational asset.
Most importantly, Agfa's solutions enable images to be securely made available across a geographically disparate health system. Point-of-care images are available in real time, which is a significant benefit for a busy Trauma I hospital such as UMMC. Agfa's Enterprise Imaging modular approach is attractive to health systems such as UMMC, as it allows for readily deployed enhancements in the future as required by the organization's multi-specialty needs and strategy, targeted at specific clinical use cases and deployed at the hospital's own pace.
The Agfa HealthCare Enterprise Imaging platform creates a comprehensive imaging ecosystem that enables images, from anywhere, to be available to all involved caregivers across the care continuum. For example, the platform can make transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) and echocardiograph imaging swiftly available across the enterprise. Not only does this support the fast-paced work of the trauma center, but it also supports the needs of the hospital's transplant program.
UMMC has contracted for the following Agfa solutions:
- Enterprise Imaging Vendor-Neutral Archive (VNA) - consolidates imaging data from multiple systems, departments, facilities and vendors into a central clinical data foundation;
- Enterprise Imaging Exchange - allows fast, secure, reliable transfer of patient studies, without time-consuming CDs or DVDs; and
- Web-based Xero universal image viewer - provides secure access to DICOM and non-DICOM imaging data from different departments and multiple sources, in one view, to anyone inside and outside of the hospital who needs it.
UMMC, located in Jackson, Miss., is the state's only academic health science center. Three specialized hospitals on the Jackson campus include the only children's hospital in Mississippi, a women and infants' hospital, and a critical care hospital, along with the University Hospital. UMMC offers the only Level I trauma center, the only Level IV neonatal intensive care nursery, and the only organ transplant programs in the state. University Physicians, the faculty group practice of the School of Medicine, includes approximately 500 doctors who care for patients in locations around the state. UMMC includes two community hospitals, UMMC Holmes County and UMMC Grenada. Its annual budget of more than $1.6 billion represents 2 percent of the state's economy.
For more information: www.agfahealthcare.com
April 22, 2024 
