AGFA HealthCare has been dedicated to Enterprise Imaging since 2010. They were first in the industry to build a platform from the ground up—but recently, they’ve stepped up their game. Momentum in market adoption of the platform approach to enterprise imaging is evident in the company’s growing business agreements, as leading health systems select AGFA HealthCare Enterprise Imaging Platform that creates an Imaging Health Record™ (IHR).
New, too, is a roster of fresh, top talent at AGFA HealthCare leading the charge to make technology more impactful than ever for clients. Earlier this year, Nathalie McCaughley signed on as president of AGFA HealthCare, the company’s Imaging IT division, bringing along more than 20 years of experience as a healthcare technology executive.
At AGFA, she’s staying on the pulse of what clinicians need to do their jobs better and faster while embracing complexity and continuing to expand solutions to address clinical, operational and business challenges.
Here, she shares her client-driven vision for providing industry-leading imaging solutions—and ways to make the use and management of medical imaging more efficient and effective today and for the long term.
“The only way to get through [radiologists’] increasingly hectic day is to find their flow—and stay there as long as possible. When they’re able to work in the flow, distractions melt away, technology feels like an extension of the thought process, and they’re working at the top of their craft.”
Helping radiologists find their flow
At the top of McCaughley’s list of priorities is a focus on enabling flow—the ability of radiologists and clinicians to cut through the noise and stay focused on the ultimate goal of their role: getting rapidly to an accurate diagnosis, and communicating it to the right people.
“We’re working in an age of unprecedented medical innovation,” McCaughley says. “But to physicians, what’s often hailed as progress just ends up feeling like more information coming at them from more places. The only way to get through their increasingly hectic day is to find their flow—and stay there as long as possible. When they’re able to work in the flow, distractions melt away, technology feels like an extension of the thought process, and they’re working at the top of their craft.”
AGFA HealthCare’s Enterprise Imaging (EI) for Radiology is a feature-rich solution that, importantly, is a platform powering a single database, meaning that radiologists don’t get bogged down by the need to sign into multiple systems to get the information they need. In a single system across the extended clinical enterprise, EI offers consistent and speedy image access, universal viewing, consolidated data storage and image lifecycle management across the enterprise. Additionally, standardizing information yields multiple operational efficiencies both for individual service lines, the enterprise and the broader health ecosystem.
This converged services approach helps clinicians “stay in their flow as long as they need to be there,” McCaughley says. “Our Enterprise Imaging Platform uses automation, seamless integration and cross-team collaboration to simplify the complexity of today’s reading life. It’s about enhancing productivity and improving experience. Our Imaging Health Record™ allows physicians to access and view imaging information no matter where in the system they were created.”
With a comprehensive view of a patient, physicians can spend more time looking at patient information—and less time searching for it. They’re also finally free to focus more time on what they do best: help people.
Active communication with users and clinical stakeholders
Ultimately, it is people that McCaughley sees as the most powerful tools in any healthcare system. “That’s why our Enterprise Imaging Platform is carefully designed to do more than compile medical images,” she notes. “It’s a tool to empower each person to be the best version of themselves.”
Doing so is driven by strong engagement with radiologists, clinicians, IT leaders and other organizational players whom the company considers as ongoing clients, not just transactional customers.
“What we're seeing is that the level of engagement, adoption and utilization of the technology largely define the return on investment for our clients, and the level of benefit they experience. Our ability to engage with clients proactively—before, during and after implementation—is what supports the delivery of a successful technology journey.”
To develop those client relationships, McCaughley and her staff—including the company’s new Chief Technology Officer Dan Brown and Chief Medical Officer Anjum Ahmed—are focused on being responsive listeners. Gaining intimacy and fluency with different client ecosystems and workflows helps ensure that AGFA is not just providing products, but solutions—and that those solutions are fully client-centric and patient-first.
“What we're seeing is that the level of engagement, adoption and utilization of the technology largely define the return on investment for our clients, and the level of benefit they experience,” McCaughley says. “Our ability to engage with clients proactively—before, during and after implementation—is what supports the delivery of a successful technology journey.”
McCaughley continues, “I feel very strongly that value resides in delivering outcomes of the technology—and continuing to innovate over time acting as the partner of choice.”
It's during visits to client facilities and conversations with clinical and non-clinical advisory boards that AGFA learns which innovations top the list to improve our technology even more. They talk challenges, opportunities and priorities.
“We have Advisory Boards in both North America and in Europe, and we’re always seeking input from them as to what needs to be next and what is a priority,” she says. “And we share our technology and innovation roadmaps with them to make sure we’re on the right track.”
Feature prioritization: Balancing business strategy and clinical needs
“It is critical that we remain agile and nimble, and adapt as much as possible, as quickly as possible,” McCaughley says “We recognize that we're not in a fixed, static type of environment. Things change every day. A good example is the pandemic which has shaken care delivery to the core.”
“We’re operating at the intersection of technology and people, looking at ways to help our clients operate at the pace most comfortable for them, while also supporting that constant need for faster, more accurate, consistent diagnostics.”
When prioritizing new solutions and features, the company also works hard to understand clients’ current tradeoffs between business and clinical needs. Both, McCaughley notes, are crucial to supporting healthy ecosystems that help clinicians and healthcare systems thrive. Client input helps AGFA employ a shared vision through enhancing flow and embracing complexity, and fulfill the role of the forward-thinking tech-savvy partner to customers across all imaging departments.
“Everybody has cost constraints today, and clinical staff shortages are a pervasive problem that we’re seeing everywhere,” she notes. “So we’re operating at the intersection of technology and people, looking at ways to help our clients operate at the pace most comfortable for them, while also supporting that constant need for faster, more accurate, consistent diagnostics.”
At the end of the day, McCaughley’s goal for AGFA is to be a listener, doer and problem-solver.
“We're taking a humble approach,” as she says, “getting closer to our clients, and really helping them achieve their goals rather than just trying to sell technology. We’re in the business of supporting our clients—it is about the ease of the human workflow, not only delivering technology.”
Ongoing engagement on quality-first solutions, and speedy resolution of issues
McCaughley is the first to point out that pushing the pace can be challenging. On-boarding imaging software is a complex process with many variables. It touches everything from the business side of things to the operations side of things, patient flow, what the technologists do, the radiologists, the clinicians.
“It’s our responsibility to have the right processes internally to test our releases with different types of clients and different types of environments,” as McCaughley puts it.
Specifically, the company works with a core contingent of leading clients with large networks, advanced workflows and complex demands to test its new products before features are released.
“We have a lot happening around education, continuous training and user groups to enhance utilization and exchange best practices. Flawless implementation is only the beginning—what matters most isn’t that the solutions are installed, but that radiologists are actually using them to the fullest.”
Additionally, the company understands that even if everything works perfectly from their side, they also have to take into account potential constraints or weak points on the client’s network side. “This discovery is a key aspect of success when it comes to releasing software and utilization of software,” she says. “We have a support team, an engineering team, and subject matter experts, with an integrated and cross-functional approach to everything we do.”
The efforts don’t end after features are deployed, and the company makes ongoing efforts to make sure that radiologists and clinicians are putting the technology to its best use. It always comes back to helping users find and maintain their flow.
“We have a lot happening around education, continuous training and user groups to enhance utilization and exchange best practices,” McCaughley says. “Flawless implementation is only the beginning—what matters most isn’t that the solutions are installed, but that radiologists are actually using them to the fullest.”
Expanding the company’s presence to drive better care
With a long record of serving leading health care systems across the globe, and a strong foothold in the U.S. and Canada, McCaughley notes that bringing AGFA’s services to a larger client base in North America is one of the company’s key priorities.
They’re taking the same “How can we help?” approach to new clients that they do with current clients.
Ultimately, of course, expanding their presence and relevance in North America is just one step on the path to an even larger goal: better enterprise imaging tools for all radiologists and clinicians, enhancing their care journey and helping them stay focused on patients, while delivering on the business objectives of larger health ecosystems, accelerating their transformation and unlocking value.
“As far as I'm concerned, what really matters is how well our solution helps clients meet their goals,” McCaughley says. “This is our measure of success.”