Qaelum NV and Agfa Healthcare sign collaboration agreement

The solution supports organizations to manage, analyze and balance their dose management

Solution provides data on dose at the study, patient, device, modality or institution level.
Helps ensure compliance with regulations and highlights conformance to guidelines.
Supports radiology best practices and better-informed decisions by physicians.

Agfa HealthCare announces today that it has signed an agreement with Qaelum for a strategic alliance on a dose monitoring system, to support the dose management needs of hospitals and imaging networks. Primary focus will be on the EMEA region. Radiation exposure is an issue for every player in a patient’s treatment, from the patient, to the referring physician, to the radiology department, to regulatory bodies and to researchers. The Dose Monitoring Solution will enable organizations to manage, analyze and balance their radiation dose management.

Flexible solution integrates in the existing PACS environment

With the strategic alliance, Agfa HealthCare’s Dose Monitoring Solution will include Qaelum’s tqm|DOSETM platform for patient radiation dose monitoring, analysis and improvement in digital imaging. The Dose Management Solution integrates in existing PACS environments and collects relevant dose and metadata information. It then uses this information to provide radiation dose analyses at the study, patient, device, modality, institution or regional level. Information on radiation exposure levels can support the referring physician in making a better-informed decision, while allowing the radiology department to conform to best practices and to regulations, for example. The platform also provides all the tools needed to perform Root Cause Analysis, to understand and solve potential problems.

Optimized workflows and quality assurance

“Qaelum is a leader in Advanced Dose Management software solutions,” says Willy Rose, Head of Marketing IT EMEA of Agfa HealthCare. “Our strategic alliance will help support medical imaging departments’ goal of providing ALARA (As Low As Reasonably Achievable) compliant x-ray imaging protocols, as well as optimized workflows and quality assurance, while maximizing the use of existing resources and investments.”
“We are delighted to be working with Agfa HealthCare as part of this innovative and forward thinking initiative,” says Jurgen Jacobs, CEO and co-founder of Qaelum. “By combining our own strengths in Dose Management with the flexibility and functionality of Agfa HealthCare’s solutions, we can now offer healthcare enterprises a distinctive solution that addresses many of today’s challenges with reporting patient radiation dose and enables genuine improvement. Our combined solution will help institutions drive more value from their existing PACS/RIS investments, now and into the future.”

(*) Agfa HealthCare Dose Monitoring Solution with Qaelum tqm|DOSETM platform is not available in the U.S. or Canada.

About Qaelum NV

Qaelum NV is a Leuven, Belgium-based medical software solutions provider advocating patient safety and quality improvement in medical imaging environments. Begun as an academic project at the University Hospitals of Leuven, it is now the preferred choice for leading European institutions. Qaelum’s mission is to help various social healthcare stakeholders, from patients and healthcare professionals to regulators, in creating patient safe and optimized medical imaging environments. Qaelum does this by developing and implementing user-friendly and state of the art software solutions extensively validated by key opinion leaders in the field.

For more information on Qaelum NV, please visit http://www.qaelum.com/

About Agfa

The Agfa-Gevaert Group is one of the world’s leading companies in imaging and information technology. Agfa develops manufactures and markets analogue and digital systems for the printing industry (Agfa Graphics), for the healthcare sector (Agfa HealthCare), and for specific industrial applications (Agfa Materials). Agfa is headquartered in Mortsel, Belgium. The company is present in 40 countries and has agents in another 100 countries around the globe. The Agfa-Gevaert Group achieved a turnover of 2,865 million euro in 2013.

About Agfa HealthCare

Agfa HealthCare, a member of the Agfa-Gevaert Group, is a leading global provider of diagnostic imaging and healthcare IT solutions. The company has nearly a century of healthcare experience and has been a pioneer on the healthcare IT market since the early 1990's. Today Agfa HealthCare designs, develops and delivers state-of-the-art systems for capturing, managing and processing diagnostic images and clinical/administrative information for hospitals and healthcare facilities, as well as contrast media solutions to enable effective medical imaging results. The company has sales offices and agents in over 100 markets worldwide. Sales for Agfa HealthCare in 2013 were 1,160 million euro.