Seamless Extension of PACS into Primary Care

The first primary care facility to benefit from this development is the brand new Whitegate Health Centre in the center of Blackpool. The centre, commissioned by NHS Blackpool houses a GP Practice, a GP Led Health Centre, a Walk-In Centre, dental services. and diagnostics, including MRI scanning, x-ray and ultrasound. The Centre has been equipped with Agfa HealthCare's IMPAX Picture Archiving and Communications System (PACS), operating as extension to the established Acute Trust PACS, which 'went live'in 2001. The new deployment comprises an additional workflow manager, image storage and a diagnostic reporting workstation.

Since the nature of services provided by the new 'Dazi Health Centre' means that full integration with the Acute Trust PACS offered the most appropriate solution for seamless primary and secondary patient care across the Fylde Coast.

Images acquired at the Whitegate Health Centre are stored onto a SAN server sited within the centre and then copied to long-term storage and web servers within the Acute Trust PACS. This makes them available for viewing at any of the six sites supported by the Acute Trust, where they can be accessed via 26 diagnostic workstations or any of the 4,500 networked PCs located within the Trust and NHS Blackpool.

The net result is that primary and secondary care imaging is now available within both sectors, meaning that clinicians have access to the patient's entire imaging records, no mater which setting they are working in.

Richard Day, PACS Manager, said, "We are looking forward to providing the best possible imaging service for patients and welcome the opportunity to extend our PACS into the Primary Care sector. In addition to giving authorised healthcare professionals working in the new Whitegate Health Centre access to stored images, we could also look to extend this to any other GP surgeries or health centres, should they request it."

Stewart Whitley, Radiology Advisor at the Whitegate Health Centre, said "We are delighted with the new PACS system that Agfa HealthCare has installed within the unit. It has significantly increased the entire local area's capacity and it will help reduce the strain on Blackpool's Victoria Hospital and allow NHS Blackpool to develop new pathways. The image quality of Agfa HealthCare's PACS system is superb and response is excellent. With these state of the art systems now installed this is a tremendous centre for the future of Blackpool."

NHS Blackpool has plans to build two more super health centres over the next few years and each will also have access to PACS.

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• Agfa HealthCare's Profile

About Agfa
The Agfa-Gevaert Group is one of the world's leading imaging and information technology companies. Agfa develops, manufactures and markets analogue and digital systems for the printing industry (Agfa Graphics), the healthcare sector (Agfa HealthCare) and specific industrial applications (Agfa Materials). Agfa's headquarters are in Mortsel, Belgium. The company is present in 40 countries and has agents in another 100 countries throughout the world. The Agfa-Gevaert Group achieved a turnover of 3,032 million Euro in 2008.

About Agfa HealthCare
Agfa HealthCare, a member of the Agfa-Gevaert Group, is a leading provider of IT-enabled clinical workflow and diagnostic image management solutions, and state-of-the-art systems for capturing and processing images in hospitals and healthcare facilities. Agfa HealthCare has over a century of healthcare experience related to diagnostic imaging and has been a pioneer on the healthcare IT market since the early 1990's. The HealthCare division has sales offices and agents in over 100 markets worldwide. Sales for Agfa HealthCare in 2008 were 1,223 million Euro.

For more information on Agfa HealthCare, please visit www.agfa.com/healthcare.