Salzburg hospitals implement Agfa

The main hospital group in the Salzburg region of Austria, Salzburger Landeskliniken (SALK), has implemented a new Hospital Information System (HIS) and a new Picture Archiving and Communications System (PACS), both supplied by Agfa Healthcare.

Agfa has provided the hospital group with its Orbis HIS and Impax PACS solutions. Following 18 months of preparatory work, Orbis was rolled out and now serves 350 organizational units within the hospital group. These include hospital wards, outpatient units, operating theaters, and specialist departments.

With four hospitals and 4,900 staff Salzburger Landeskliniken provides hospital services for the entire federal state of Salzburg. After carrying out a Europe-wide procurement, SALK chose Agfa for the project and the contract was awarded at the beginning of 2006.

The multi-stage planning and introductory process provides for the integration of all key functional units, including the laboratories and sub-systems. Over the next two years, SALK plans to move to digital documentation across the hospital group.

Orbis replaces a heterogeneous system landscape in Salzburg, and has been installed to ensure patient data is available to staff at all times.

In total 600,000 patient records and details of investigations have been securely migrated to the new Orbis and Impax solution.

In two departments – discharge report compilation and diagnostic evaluation – the introduction of Orbis has helped cut the number of standard forms from 650 to 50.

As part of the project, a number of medical imaging workstations and imaging systems have been integrated into the Agfa HealthCare HIS.

In a statement SALK managing director, Dr Max Laimböck, said: "With the introduction of the new Hospital Information System, the SALK has passed a major milestone on the road to establishing itself as a state-of-the-art, process-oriented healthcare organization."

Marcus Theis, the HIS/PACS project manager added: "A project of this magnitude represents an immense challenge for all the parties involved. We are extremely grateful for the excellent collaboration with our personnel in the various hospital departments as well as with our partners at Agfa HealthCare."

Andrea Fiumicelli, executive vice-president Agfa HealthCare, commented: "We would like to congratulate the SALK team and our own personnel on the excellent, on-time realization of this large and challenging project. We have again demonstrated that when major organizations in the healthcare sector require a reliable provider of workflow and imaging systems for hospitals or clinics, they need to look no further than the market-leading solutions of Agfa HealthCare."