Forcare signs Amsterdam EZDA deal
- 26 February 2010
The Amsterdam Regional Health Information Exchange organisation, EZDA, has signed a deal with Dutch software provider Forcare for its XDS-based products to enhance the exchange of regional radiology information.
Initially, the radiology information exchange will connect three major health centres, including the Academic Medical Center, the OLVG Hospital and the Dutch National Cancer Institute “Antonie van Leeuwenhoek”, before other hospitals are connected at a later date.
The radiology information exchange network will enable sharing of image and report data between different radiology information and picture archiving and communications systems across hospitals in Amsterdam.
The network will a series of Integrating the Healthcare Exchange (IHE) tools: a central cross enterprise document sharing registry, forIndex; an XDS repository, forStore; and audit trail and authentication repository, forAudit.
Jeroen Straatman, director of EZDA Amsterdam, said: “There is a strong need to make the exchange of radiology images and reports more efficient. Many hospitals today still use DICOM CDs to exchange radiology data.
“This is inefficient, costly and leads to many delays in patient treatments. We are investing in an IHE XDS-based network to eliminate the use of CDs in radiology. At the same time we are looking forward to use the same network for other clinical specialties.”
Forcare’s Dutch distributor E.Novation will deploy Forcare’s XDS (cross enterprise document sharing) components in the datacentre of the Amsterdam Health Information Exchange.
Andries Hamster, chief marketing officer at Forcare, said: “The radiology network will use Forcare’s world-class XDS-based products that were validated at many IHE connectathons. Most convincing to this customer was that we were able to demonstrate successful deployments in other regional networks in the Netherlands.”
Forcare will be exhibiting at HIMSS annual conference and exhibition in Atlanta next week, where it will be demonstrating its existing products and launch two new health information exchange enablers at the event, forShare and Forcare’s HIE XDS toolkit.
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