ECR 2013.indd - Agfa HealthCare

AMC Hospital, Amsterdam, The NetherlandsGlobal Remote Incident Preventionservices bring peace of mind toradiology departmentGRIP increases uptime levels and reduces patient care delaysInterviewees Dr. Annette Bak, Manager of Radiology and Nuclear Medicine · Jan Wolters, Functional Application Specialistshowed the best overall score, andwhen they suggested that we supportour version of the IMPAX radiologysolution with Global Remote IncidentPrevention (GRIP), we were quiteconfident we would also benefit fromthis new service.”GRIP provides state-of-the-artelectronic monitoring of IMPAXRIS/PACS to help prevent serviceinterruptions or downtime surprisesin the healthcare IT environment. Apermanently open VPN connection linksGRIP to the Agfa HealthCare centralmonitoring center in Rijswijk, TheNetherlands.With its new GRIP remote monitoring andevent management and reporting solution,the Academic Medical Center (AMC) inAmsterdam, The Netherlands, expectsto reduce the incidence of technicalincidents. “With GRIP we can providehigher uptime levels to our users in theradiology department,” says FunctionalApplication Specialist Jan Wolters.12 THERE“It brings a peace of mind thatincidents will not affect our endusers.”Dr. Annette Bak,Manager of Radiology and Nuclear MedicineBefore AMC Hospital in Amsterdamdecided to install an IMPAX RIS/PACS solution from Agfa HealthCare,it went through a lengthy Europeantender process. “The upside of this wasthat we gained an in-depth view ofour IT-supported workflow,” says Dr.Annette Bak, Manager of Radiology andNuclear Medicine. “Agfa HealthCarePreventing delays in patientcareGRIP services consist of a real-time,centralized global monitoring centerand technical team, watching fordisruptive incidents at all connectedcustomer sites. “You can havecommunication problems between RISand PACS, where patients may not beincluded in the PACS queue, but theymay already be in the examinationroom,” says Jan Wolters. “Currently wehave some 80 open incidents. We lookinto each incident first ourselves, andif we cannot handle it, we refer to AgfaHealthCare’s helpdesk.”At AMC Hospital, the GRIP solution isset up to act when certain thresholdsof event incidence are surpassed. Thethreshold determines when GRIP notifiesthe hospital, explains Jan Wolters.“At the moment we are fine-tuningthese thresholds together with AgfaHealthCare and also implementing newmonitoring points in the system. A lowthreshold results in a high reportinglevel of incidents, many of which maynot be important. A high threshold maylead to a reduced preventive reliability.The balance is where we have the lowest