Agfa team lands first order under DIN-PACS contract

Vendor secures award from Pentagon Clinic

Film and PACS vendor Agfa of Ridgefield Park, NJ, has begun to make its presence felt in the competition for contracts in the U.S. military's Digital Imaging Network-Picture Archiving and Communications Systems project. After missing out on all other DIN-PACS awards to date, the Agfa team has received a purchase order valued at $1.5 million from the Pentagon Clinic, which was the last site specifically named in the DIN-PACS request for proposal.

The Pentagon Clinic will be purchasing a PACS network that includes a magneto-optical disk-based archive, four diagnostic workstations, and approximately 70 clinical review workstations. A RIS from Cerner will also be added. Installation at the Pentagon Clinic is expected to begin the first quarter of 1999, with a completion date scheduled for the second quarter.

As part of the award, Agfa will also be integrating the Pentagon Clinic PACS with the PACS network at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC. Walter Reed has a PACS network from the military's previous Medical Diagnostic Imaging Support (MDIS) project.

The award is particularly good news for Agfa, which in April formed a dedicated team to handle sales and marketing efforts to all military and government customers (SCAN 4/29/98). Called MIL-PACS, the organization works closely with other Agfa DIN-PACS consortium members, which include Cabletron Systems, Cerner, and Mitra Imaging. Other companies contributing to the consortium are Dome Imaging, Oracle, and Sun Microsystems.

With the first order under its belt, the Agfa team will certainly be looking to leverage the Pentagon Clinic site for future DIN-PACS sales, according to Bob Cooke, Agfa's director of network solutions.

"We're looking forward to this as an opportunity for us to really demonstrate our skills and capabilities in PACS, as well as in the integration arena, to the government," Cooke said.

As Agfa's military sales efforts progress, the company's commercial success moves forward as well. The vendor recently was awarded a $5 million large-scale PACS contract from St. Luke's-Roosevelt Medical Center in New York City. Agfa's Web 1000 image distribution software, which is nearing general release, is part of the St. Luke's order.