Agfa HealthCare and ICW announce eHealth collaboration

Mortsel, Belgium / Walldorf, Germany – May 10, 2007 – 11:00 CET

Agfa HealthCare, a leading provider of IT enabled clinical workflow and diagnostic imaging solutions, and InterComponentWare AG (ICW), the eHealth specialist, announce today that they are intensifying their co-operation efforts. The non-exclusive agreement covers the development of seamless integration and interoperability between Agfa HealthCare’s Hospital Information System (HIS) ORBISTM and ICW’s eHealth Framework.

EHealth solutions are aimed at improving the overall quality of care by allowing healthcare providers to share all relevant patient medical data for an individual in treatment (highlighting allergies, medication history and so forth). This allows each treating physician to see the total medical record of the patient, regardless of location, and supports them in their diagnosis and treatment planning.

The ICW eHealth Framework is an open platform for the development of service-oriented solutions for the healthcare market. It offers standardized interfaces for the integration of existing applications of other manufacturers with solutions from ICW. The eHealth Framework enables seamless integration, allowing different existing systems to be combined into one consistent solution.

The non-exclusive agreement will strengthen Agfa HealthCare’s expanding position in the eHealth market. The company has already successfully linked its ORBIS solutions amongst different facilities of hospital groups in Europe, and offers the possibility for integration of its applications with general practitioner software vendors. Agfa HealthCare’s ORBIS has currently been deployed in over 750 institutions across continental Europe with more than 450,000 daily users, making it one of the leading healthcare IT providers.

The agreement is an extension of an ongoing co-operation between the two companies on homogeneity issues in the hospital sector. Agfa HealthCare and ICW, amongst others, have already actively co-operated in various working groups in Germany, including the VHitG (Verband der Hersteller von IT-Lösungen für das Gesundheitswesen), on the implementation of HL7 (Health Level 7) in Germany and on the development of an electronic case record.

The many years of experience of ICW developing and using its own eHealth solutions have been incorporated into the eHealth Framework. It is the foundation for all product developments at ICW and is offered to interested partners for their own development purposes.

Philippe Houssiau, President of Agfa HealthCare, explains: “The solutions of Agfa HealthCare and ICW supplement each other optimally. Agfa HealthCare has outstandingly positioned HIS (Hospital Information System), RIS (Radiology Information System), and PACS (Picture Archiving and Communications System) solutions. ICW contributes its many years of know-how in networking existing systems and its personal health record LifeSensor to the partnership”.

Peter Reuschel, Chief Executive Officer of ICW agrees: “The collaboration of Agfa HealthCare and ICW offers the customers of both companies a unique added value, because existing systems can be integrated more effectively.”

HL7 is an information exchange standard. It is a standard for the exchange, management and integration of data that support clinical patient care and for the management, delivery and evaluation of healthcare services.

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 film related products 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 3,401 million Euro in 2006.

About Agfa HealthCare
Agfa HealthCare, a member of the Agfa-Gevaert Group, is a leading provider of IT-enabled clinical workflow and image management solutions, and state-of-the-art systems for capturing, processing and printing images in hospitals and healthcare facilities. The company has over a century of experience in diagnostic imaging and has been a pioneer on the healthcare IT market since the early 1990’s. Agfa HealthCare today employs 5,700 staff members, with sales offices and representatives in over 100 markets worldwide. Sales for Agfa HealthCare in 2006 were 1,452 million Euro, accounting for 43% of total group sales.

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

For more information on InterComponentWare, please visit www.icw-global.com.

About InterComponentWare
InterComponentWare AG (ICW) is a leading international eHealth specialist with locations in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the USA and Bulgaria. Its solutions for networking the various players in the healthcare system lastingly improve process-oriented communication and data integrity, and therefore also the quality of healthcare. Among other things, ICW develops and distributes software and hardware components for the healthcare IT infrastructure for electronic health cards, the LifeSensor personal health record as well as networking solutions for hospitals and physician offices. As part of the bIT4health consortium, ICW provided important consulting services for the implementation of the electronic health card in Germany, is involved in the Austrian eCard project and has recently won the pilot project for the national health card in Bulgaria.

For additional information, please contact:

InterComponentWare Inc.
Nils Effertz
One Waters Park Drive – Suite 280
San Mateo, CA 94403
Tel: 1 650 295 2124
Fax: 1 650 212 2890
E-Mail: Nils.Effertz@icw-global.com
www.icw-global.com
www.LifeSensor.com

InterComponentWare AG
Dirk Schuhmann
Otto-Hahn-Straße 3
69190 Walldorf, Germany

Tel: 49 (0) 6227-385-133
Fax: 49 (0) 6227-385-199

E-Mail: Dirk.Schuhmann@icw.de

www.icw.de
www.LifeSensor.de

This release was published on openPR.