[March 22, 2011]

CoActiv EXAM-PACS® Selected to Support Unique Orthopedic Hospital in Ghana

The Foundation of Orthopedics and Complex Spine (FOCOS) has selected CoActiv EXAM-PACS for the viewing, management, archiving and communications of medical images at its new FOCOS Orthopedic Hospital in Ghana, West Africa, set to open in mid-2011. An important humanitarian effort to provide much needed care to scoliosis patients, the not-for-profit hospital was founded by Dr. Oheneba Boachie-Adjei, an attending orthopedic surgeon at the prestigious Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City (HSS) who was born in Ghana. The hospital is supported in part by HSS volunteers and donations of equipment and supplies and is committed to bringing the most advanced medical services and technology to patients in Ghana and throughout West Africa.

According to Dr. Boachie, "The FOCOS Orthopedic Hospital is a demanding installation, and CoActiv EXAM-PACS is an excellent choice to meet its full range of needs. The CoActiv PACS provides an extremely user-friendly interface as well as a broad range of advanced features, including the specialized orthopedic features required to read detailed spine images. Also important to the selection of the CoActiv technology is its ability to easily communicate files for remote reading anywhere around the globe using cloud-based architecture."

Dr. Boachie notes that the hospital will offer a full range of advanced modalities, including CT, MRI, x-ray and biplanar fluoroscopy exams. Many of these images will be sent across the globe to the Hospital for Special Surgery and to his office in particular for interpretation and surgical planning. With year-round services delivered on both an inpatient and outpatient basis, the hospital anticipates a start-up volume of about 6,000 exams annually. Initially, the FOCOS Hospital will install about 12 EXAM-PACS workstations but anticipates imaging volume to grow as the hospital expands, making system scalability important.

In addition to managing images, the advanced CoActiv solution will enable the hospital to store a full range of scanned documents in patient files, whil providing the standards-based formatting to support an electronic medical record (EMR) in the future. These features are extremely important to help the hospital manage its large and diverse population drawn from a large geographic area.

Dr. Boachie comments, "CoActiv's EXAM-PACS will fulfill an important role at the hospital by providing a powerful system to store a full range of patient imaging data that at the same time is easy-to-use and will not make onerous demands of the hospital's limited IT infrastructure. Because of its state-of-the-art architecture, the CoActiv system will make the most of our existing resources without placing large demands for more advanced supporting technology."

The mission of FOCOS is to make optimal surgical and non-surgical care of disabling musculoskeletal problems including complex spine and pediatric orthopedic disorders available in developing nations. The FOCOS Orthopedic Hospital will comprise nine buildings on five acres and initially provide 50 beds. Staffed by a combination of salaried and volunteer staff, it is expected to treat 5,000 patients annually, primarily to improve the quality of life as well as life expectancy for scoliosis and orthopedics patients. Scoliosis is an extremely widespread medical condition throughout most parts of West Africa and has significant impact on the population.

"We are pleased and proud to be part of this important effort to provide much-needed medical assistance in underserved areas of Africa," says Ed Heere, president and CEO of CoActiv. "We were moved by the conviction of all involved in the project and wanted to contribute by making EXAM-PACS available for a nominal fee that covered some of our hard expenses. The hospital is the culmination of the energy and support of a group of extremely dedicated medical professionals and will bring state-of-the-art care, delivered using state-of-the-art technology, to address a crucial need. CoActiv's cloud-based system will play a key role facilitating this by enabling physicians across the globe to offer remote consultation and diagnosis."

About CoActiv

CoActiv Medical^™ is a leading healthcare software and IT systems provider offering a full line of PACS, digital image and data storage services and related solutions for hospitals, imaging facilities and medical practices of all sizes. CoActiv's EXAM-PACS^® family of web-based PACS solutions provide leading edge, affordable and scalable image management with sophisticated tools that cater to the needs of radiologists as well as a full range of other imaging specialists. Available as both enterprise server-based and cloud-based solutions, EXAM-PACS is designed for easy integration into imaging facilities of any size. Comprised of modular software components, EXAM-PACS enables any site to customize a solution to meet their specific needs and budgets or to add advanced functionality to an existing PACS solution. EXAM-PACS includes EXAM-FILER^® CD-burning solution; vendor-neutral, HIPAA-compliant, offsite/online EXAM-VAULT^® QUAD-REDUNDANT ARCHIVING^®; patent-pending EXAM-SENDER^® referring physician system; EXAM-3D^® advanced, multi-modular 3D color reconstruction and visualization; and EXAM-NET (News - Alert)^™ teleradiology suite. EXAM-PACS includes such premium features as support for breast specific gamma imaging (BSGI) and storage of non-DICOM data such as prescriptions, reports and surgical plans in patient files. Complementing this is CoActiv's family of EXAM-RIS^® solutions scaled for imaging facilities of every size site and budget. Contact CoActiv at (203) 894-1651; [email protected]; www.coactiv.com.

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