Agfa announces flurry of alliances

Agfa Healthcare reveled in a deluge of business alliances as the RSNA meeting got under way Sunday. The company announced a comarketing agreement with InSiteOne regarding that company's integrated onsite and offsite archiving service.

Agfa and InSiteOne agreed to introduce to Agfa PACS customers a service featuring onsite management, redundant offsite archiving, and disaster recovery services for digital medical images. InSiteOne's installed base will also be introduced to Agfa products.

The company also announced the signing of a comarketing agreement with AccessPt. for software developed by that company to deliver data and information from multiple, disparate back-end hospital systems into a single view via Web browser. With this software, clinicians can use a single secure sign-on to access their patient records from participating hospitals.

Agfa further broadened its strategic relationship with EMC. The company is expanding its role as a reseller of EMC's Centera storage technology, as well as EMC's CLARiiON and Symmetrix networked storage solutions. Centera is optimized to store "fixed content," data files such as medical images that seldom change.

Agfa strategists expect that the expansion will help meet requirements of clinical workflow, leverage a shared infrastructure, and provide new levels of access and information sharing across healthcare enterprises.