Agfa HealthCare chosen to drive New Brunswick e-Health Program

Diagnostic imaging repository powered by Agfa HealthCare gives healthcare providers secure access to vital patient information, regardless of location

Toronto, Ontario – 25 March 2008 : Agfa HealthCare, a leading provider of IT-enabled clinical workflow and diagnostic imaging solutions, announces today it has been chosen as the vendor of choice by New Brunswick to deliver a Diagnostic Imaging Repository (DI-r). The agreement is a of major step forward for the province as it leaps forward with its e-Health strategy – One Patient One Record – which will provide the infrastructure and functionality required to capture, store, view and link relevant patient information for its 740,000 residents.

New Brunswick has partnered with Canada Health Infoway, which is contributing $18.2 million to the project, with the remaining $17.7 million coming from the province. The province expects to implement its One Patient One Record system during the next three years.

Working with IBM, who will provide consulting and implementation services for the project, Agfa HealthCare will create a Diagnostic Imaging Repository. This Diagnostic Imaging Repository is based on its IMPAX Data Center concept for consolidating a patient’s images and reports into a central system. The information can be retained for a patient’s lifetime, and is available in a standardized format, for the use of authorized clinicians. Doctors, nurses and technologists will have secure log-in access to relevant prior patient images, regardless of where they were acquired. Not only will the repository help clinicians make informed decisions about a patient’s care, healthcare facilities can also expect to significantly reduce costs and redundancies, such as the duplication of imaging exams due to lost paper files.

“The drive toward the implementation of the One Patient One Record system shows that New Brunswick is a true Canadian e-Health leader,” said Michael Green, President and CEO of Agfa HealthCare Canada. “Leveraging Agfa HealthCare’s interoperable technology, this province-wide repository addresses the need for integration across healthcare facilities. Not only will this provide more informed decision making, it will also enhance the delivery of patient care for the residents of New Brunswick.’’

New Centre to support Canadian Health Innovations

OTTAWA, March 17 /CNW Telbec/ - The Conference Board of Canada and the Canadian Health Industries Partnership (CHIP) have reached an agreement to jointly create the Centre for the Advancement of Health Innovations (CAHI).

The new centre will build on the resources, talent, and commitment of the Conference Board and CHIP to make Canada a world leader in the development and

commercialization of health innovations.CAHI will adopt a global perspective in identifying and exploring the applicability of best practices to Canada and Canadian industries. To this end, the centre will have an International Advisory Panel chaired by Henry Friesen, founding president of the Canadian Institute of Health Research and

founder of CHIP. This panel will be made up of world leaders in health innovation who bring with them a vast wealth of experience and knowledge. The inaugural meeting of this policy centre will take place on March 31-April 1, 2008 in Toronto.

The co-chairs are Dr. Calvin Stiller, Chair of Genome Canada and Mark Lievonen, President of Sanofi Pasteur Limited and Chair of CHIP.

The Conference Board of Canada (CBoC) is widely recognized as Canada's foremost independent, not-for-profit research organization specializing in economic trends, public policy, and organizational performance.

The Canadian Health Industries Partnership (CHIP) is a legally constituted not-for-profit organization that provides a forum to enable governments, academia, and leaders of Canada's industrial health innovation sector to collaborate in exchanging perspectives, discussing and developing recommended strategy directions and policy options on health innovation.

For more information, visit www.conferenceboard.ca/CAHI

IBM Opens New 3D Virtual Healthcare Island on Second Life

Interactive environment displays IBM’s vision for consumer-driven healthcare

ORLANDO, FL. – February 25, 2008 – IBM debuted at HIMSS®08 its newest island in Second Life: IBM Virtual Healthcare Island. The island is a unique, three-dimensional representation of the challenges facing today’s healthcare industry and the role information technology will play in transforming global healthcare-delivery to meet patient needs.

The island supports the strategic healthcare vision that IBM released in October2006, entitled, Healthcare 2015: Win-Win or Lose-Lose, A Portrait and a Path to Successful Transformation. The paper paints a picture of a Healthcare Industry in crisis – of health systems in the United States and many other countries that will become unsustainable by the year 2015. To avoid “lose-lose” scenarios in which global healthcare systems “hit the wall” and require immediate and forced restructuring, IBM calls for what it defines as a “win-win” option: new levels of accountability, tough decisions, hard work and focus on the consumer.

The IBM Virtual Healthcare Island is designed with a futuristic atmosphere and provides visitors with an interactive demonstration of IBM’s open-standards-based Health Information Exchange (HIE) architecture. Working with project leads in the U.S., the island was designed and built by an all-IBM-India team.

Starting from the patient’s home, they create their own Personal Health Records (PHRs) in a secure and private environment and watch as it is incorporated into an array of Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems that can be used at various medical facilities. As they move from one island station to the next, they experience how the development of a totally integrated and interoperable longitudinal Electronic Health Record (EHR) is used within a highly secured network that allows access only by patient-authorized providers and family members.

Patient avatars arrive and are welcomed at the Central Park and then visit a Central Information Hub, where IBM’s view of the healthcare industry and the power of information technology to transform it are presented. An amphitheater on the Hub’s second floor provides an area that can support virtual meetings, complete with a large video screen and accompanying slide presentation on IBM’s HIE architecture and the positive impact that this technology can have in the transformation of the Healthcare Industry.

Visitors can then walk, fly or use transporters to visit the various island stations:

• The Patient’s Home: In the secure environment of a private home, patient avatars can initiate a PHR and populate it with their personal health characteristics and clinical history, accessed and downloaded from physician EMR data. They can also establish privacy and security preferences as well as health directives. The ground floor demonstrates secure messaging with providers and activates the initial PHR. Using a transporter to move upstairs, patients use home health devices to take weight, blood pressure and blood sugar readings in the privacy of a bedroom, further incorporating this information into the PHR, which is shown on presentation screens.

• The Laboratory: This stop offers laboratory and radiology suites to help avatars extend their understanding of the benefits of HIE. Here, patients can check in at a Patient Kiosk and have blood work and radiology tests performed. The use of EHRs – revealing only appropriate portions of the PHRs -- shows how consumers can also benefit through cost and time savings.

• The Clinic: Patient avatars transport or walk from the Lab to the Clinic, where a welcome from their primary-care physician awaits. A combination of scripting and information screens supports simulation of a patient exam, after which an electronic prescription is generated, and the continued development of the EHR is explained on nearby screens.

• The Pharmacy: Here, avatars can check in at a Patient Kiosk that simulates the verifying of drug information. They then receive their prescriptions and update their PHRs/EHRs with new medication data. The HIE architecture demonstrates how use of PHR/EHR technology can prevent consumers from purchasing medications that are contra-indicated given the medicines they presently require, as well as alerting them about potential drug-to-drug interactions. The PHR/EHR is again updated.

• The Hospital: In this futuristic, three story structure, avatars arrive for a scheduled visit with a specialist. Physicians’ offices, patient rooms and exam rooms are all simulated here.

• The Emergency Room: Avatars can chose to experience a virtual emergency by “touching” a specially scripted control. This engages a medical episode and a ride on a fast gurney directly into the private and secure emergency treatment area, where a special screen is programmed to reveal the full incorporation of the PHR to ensure proper treatment.

Acording to Dan Pelino, General Manager, IBM Global Healthcare & Life Sciences Industry, IBM offers the Virtual Health Island as a tool for its healthcare customers and itsworldwide sales force. The island allows each healthcare stakeholder to envision how the total system can be affected by intercession at each juncture of the healthcare delivery process. The use of our new virtual world provides an important, next-generation Internet-based resource to show how standards; business planning; the use of a secured, extensible and expandable architecture; HIE interoperability; and data use for healthcare analytics, quality, wellness and disease management are all helping to transform our industry.

IBM’s Healthcare & Life Sciences (HCLS) Industry will continue to develop the new island in months to come. The island can perform as a virtually “always on” demonstration tool for IBM’s sales personnel. A video version of the island is also under production.

IBM believes in the significant promise of virtual-worlds technologies far beyond today's usage: the next evolutionary phase of the Internet. IBM is helping clients and partners to conduct business inside virtual worlds and to connect the virtual world with the real world through a richer, more immersive Web environment.

Second Life is a 3D online world created by Linden Lab, a company founded in 1999 by Philip Rosedale, to create a revolutionary new form of shared 3D experience. Last October, IBM and Linden Lab announced their intent to jointly develop new technologies and methodologies based on open standards that will help advance the future of 3D virtual worlds.

For more information: Gina Jesberg, Mobile: (203) 545-3186 Email: ginajes@us.ibm.com

IBM Unveils the Next Generation of Enterprise Health Analytics

ORLANDO, FL – February 25, 2008 – IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced at HIMSS®08 a ground-breaking, comprehensive portfolio of health analytics solutions for healthcare providers. IBM’s proven Enterprise Health Analytics harness the power of massive information generated by today’s healthcare industry by converting it into new, data-driven intelligence. This rich source of clinical and business insight can bring strategic differentiation to providers by giving them unprecedented knowledge about their operations, patients, and effectively all aspects of their businesses.

IBM's Enterprise Health Analytics are a complete suite of services, infrastructure, and tools that can be tailored to the needs of any client-- from entry level, off-the-shelf analytics capabilities to custom-built data warehouses for academic and research settings. The solutions fill a significant void in data integration and intelligent analyses that currently poses a major barrier to trans-formation in the Healthcare Industry.

According to Dan Pelino, General Manager, IBM Global Healthcare & Life Sciences Industry, we have witnessed an explosion of data and complexity in the healthcare industry over the past two decades. Hospitals moved to adopt Electronic Medical Records. Technology vendors delivered proprietary applications that captured and integrated discrete data to improve clinical processes. This meets an urgent need to convert discrete data in ways that meet growing demands from employers, payers, consumers and governments to publicly report quality, clinical outcomes, cost of care and compliance to standards.

At present, most major provider organizations have adopted a variety of proprietary, disparate systems designed and optimized for transactional performance. These departmental and transactional systems inhibit providers from having an enterprise view and the ability to quickly respond to changes in the market, such as pay-for-performance and quality reporting. What they require is an integrated system that enables data aggregation and analysis, the results of which are applied in clinical and business settings to dramatically improve quality outcomes.

In such a dynamic environment, IBM’s Enterprise Health Analytics solutions can help meet providers’ needs and generate increased competitiveness by helping them leverage their data-rich environments, even where disparate systems exist, transforming the data into intelligent, high-value clinical, business and research information. IBM can also leverage its strategic partnerships; its leadership in business intelligence in multiple industries; its leadership in high-performance and energy-efficient computing; and the movement to open standards and architectures (SOA) to help provider clients easily and affordably address the dynamics of changing business priorities.


IBM’s Enterprise Health Analytics solutions will help providers:
• Efficiently report, trend and analyze key organizational, financial and clinical metrics to improve reporting compliance, competitively participate in pay-for-performance programs, and drive performance improvement
• Access information to manage and report the progression and impact of chronic diseases such as diabetes or stroke within a system, region or market
• Predict high-risk populations and begin early interventions for wellness management
• View and analyze aggregated, specific data sets by specific populations for cohort management, disease registries, clinical guidelines, and patient safety
• Prepare for evidence-based medicine, leading to the practice of personalized medicine.

IBM’s Enterprise Health Analytics transforms information through a simplified, streamlined and “intelligent” process that successfully integrates and aggregates disparate data from multiple sources for practical use. Data is transformed through a Business Intelligence Reference Architecture that transforms disparate data, making it available in a timely manner for analysis that can solve specific clinical, business and research problems.

Further, IBM’s Enterprise Health Analytics solutions are enabled by an agile, resilient and scalable infrastructure that informs and guides clients through role-based embedded intelligence. This allows providers to predict market conditions and growth opportunities, integrate processes across their extended enterprises, and ensures scalability and the ability to adapt efficiently and deliver quickly in a rapidly changing environment.

Additionally, the recent acquisition by IBM of Cognos will dramatically increase capabilities available for providers in the area of health analytics, with early focus on performance management followed by increasing movement towards deeper clinical analytics.