Frost & Sullivan Acknowledges Agfa’s Competitive Strategy in the North American Medical Informatics Market
PALO ALTO, Calif., March 14 /PRNewswire/ — Frost & Sullivan selected Agfa HealthCare as the recipient of the 2007 Award for Competitive Strategy Leadership in the North American medical informatics solutions market.
In 2005, Agfa HealthCare set in motion the execution of an ambitious, full-fledged strategy set to reinforce the company’s position as a leading provider of medical informatics solutions for the healthcare enterprise.
During 2006, the company, led by Bob Pryor, President of Agfa HealthCare Americas, decisively overcame the key challenges facing the highly competitive picture archiving system (PACS) industry, and, under direction from David Chambers, Agfa HealthCare Americas’ vice president of Sales & Marketing, reinstated a solid growth path, and achieved market share gains.
Building upon its experience and expertise in radiology, Agfa HealthCare is expanding its solutions to other departments, such as cardiology, orthopedics and nuclear medicine as the first steps towards comprehensive coverage of all clinical departments, addressing the need to provide advanced image and information management systems coupled with enterprise-wide connectivity.
“Simultaneously, Agfa is focusing on developing its portfolio and skills to provide healthcare IT solutions for enterprise-level management, by designing best-in-class platforms for key clinical departments as well as at the enterprise level,” observes Frost & Sullivan Research Analyst Nadim Daher. “These two complementary approaches can help Agfa leverage its strong connectivity, integration, and interoperability expertise to build a successful enterprise IT organization in North America to meet the ever-evolving needs of healthcare institutions.”
Through recent acquisitions, partnerships and in-house developments, Agfa is now able to cover all aspects of hospital information management. The acquisition of Heartlab, Inc in June 2005 has afforded Agfa with outstanding cardiovascular image and information management capabilities and is creating synergies at over 440 North American Heartlab installations.
The company’s successes within major endeavors to provide nationwide medical records, such as the National Programme for IT (NPfIT) in the UK and Canada’s Infoway, confer upon Agfa Healthcare great prestige and demonstrate its outstanding capabilities in delivering healthcare IT solutions to a broad enterprise.
“Agfa understands the present and future market challenges and is undertaking concrete steps towards developing innovative and future-proof solutions to meet the needs of inpatient, outpatient, referring healthcare physicians, employees, patients, and consumers,” notes Daher. “It is well underway to becoming a total solution provider in the healthcare IT space, while maintaining an open architecture to ensure interoperability in a heterogeneous ecosystem.”
Frost & Sullivan presents the Competitive Strategy Leadership Award to a company whose competitive strategy has yielded significant gains in market share during the research period. The recognized company has taken advantage of recent market changes that facilitate the introduction of novel methods of capturing and solidifying market presence.
Frost & Sullivan Best Practices Awards recognize companies in a variety of regional and global markets for demonstrating outstanding achievement and superior performance in areas such as leadership, technological innovation, customer service, and strategic product development. Industry analysts compare market participants and measure performance through in-depth interviews, analysis, and extensive secondary research in order to identify best practices in the industry.
About Agfa HealthCare
The Agfa-Gevaert Group is one of the world’s leading imaging and information technology companies. Agfa develops, manufactures and markets analogue and digital systems for the printing industry (Agfa Graphics), the healthcare sector (Agfa HealthCare) and film related products and specific industrial applications (Agfa Materials). Agfa’s headquarters are in Mortsel, Belgium. The company is present in 40 countries and has agents in another 100 countries throughout the world. The Agfa-Gevaert Group achieved a turnover of 3,308 million Euro in 2005.
Agfa HealthCare supplies hospitals and other healthcare centers with state-of-the-art systems for the capturing, processing and managing of diagnostic images and with IT solutions that integrate information and imaging workflows into the overall hospital operations across departmental disciplines. Agfa HealthCare is a leader in the fast growing market of IT systems that span the entire healthcare enterprise and through which healthcare facilities become more efficient and effective.
For more information on Agfa HealthCare, please visit http://www.agfa.com/. About Frost & Sullivan
Frost & Sullivan, a global growth consulting company, has been partnering with clients to support the development of innovative strategies for more than 40 years. The company’s industry expertise integrates growth consulting, growth partnership services, and corporate management training to identify and develop opportunities. Frost & Sullivan serves an extensive clientele that includes Global 1000 companies, emerging companies, and the investment community by providing comprehensive industry coverage that reflects a unique global perspective and combines ongoing analysis of markets, technologies, econometrics, and demographics. For more information, visit http://www.awards.frost.com/ or http://www.medicalimaging.frost.com/
Contact: Stacie Jones 210.247.2450 Stacie.jones@frost.com
Frost & Sullivan
CONTACT: Stacie Jones of Frost & Sullivan, +1-210-247-2450,Stacie.jones@frost.com
Web site: http://www.frost.com/http://www.agfa.com/