HPE TC221A Product Data Sheet
Agfa HealthCare
safeguards critical
Case Study
Objective
Deliver eective suppor t for digital
imaging solutions spread throughout
100+ UK hospitals
Approach
Created a flexible support contract that
would give nationwide coverage for the
Hewlett Packard Enterprise hardware
IT Matters
• Delivers a 24x7x365 Call-to-Repair
service, resulting in high system
availability and better performance
• Provides early warning alerts through
eective remote monitoring
• Includes firmware upgrades delivered
by an aligned Technical Account
Manager and regular planning
meetings with assigned Account
Support Manager
Business Matters
• Avoids missed SLAs
• Provides a better service for hospitals
and their patients
• Raises the company’s profile
and competitiveness within the
UK health service
medical systems
HPE Datacenter Care supports mission
critical medical services
Agfa HealthCare has
to deliver solutions in
challenging environments
with stringent service levels
for its diagnostic imaging
systems. Running on HPE
hardware, the solutions
are installed in over 100
hospitals across a wide
geographic footprint,
so providing eective
support was a challenge.
For Agfa, the solution was
HPE Datacenter Care.
Challenge
Need for nationwide support
Providing eective support for critical IT
systems can be a diicult task but it’s even
more challenging when the systems are
located across a wide geographic footprint
in multi-site NHS Trusts, within customerprovided infrastructures.
This was the situation faced by Agfa
HealthCare, the global provider of
diagnostic imaging and healthcare IT
solutions. A Belgian multinational company
with revenues of over €1.16 billion, Agfa
HealthCare is part of the Agfa-Gevaert
Group. With over a century of healthcare
experience in medical imaging, it has been
an active player in the healthcare IT market
since the early 1990s and now has sales
oices and representatives in over 100
markets worldwide.
Case study
Agfa HealthCare
“Medical solutions are highly regulated and we cannot aord
any instances of data loss or outages, therefore proactive monitoring
by Hewlett Packard Enterprise and resilient platforms are a critical
part of our solution design. The HPE service allows us to focus on
our solutions and not spend large amounts of time and cost managing
our storage vendor.”
— Philip Brown, third party service manager, Agfa HealthCare
Industry
Healthcare
Page 2
Agfa HealthCare develops software for
capturing and archiving various medical
images but rather than delivering just the
software, it wanted to provide customers
with total solutions including both the
software and the systems to drive it.
“We provide the full range of hardware
from high-end workstations up to the core
servers, tape libraries and storage,” explains
Philip Brown, third party service manager for
Agfa HealthCare.
“We have a managed service model. Again
customers purchase a service from Agfa
and we deal with all the details regarding
hardware, software and maintenance.
Ninety-eight per cent of our systems run on
Hewlett Packard Enterprise hardware.”
HPE systems are purchased in Belgium
and go to a staging depot where Agfa
HealthCare and HPE sta configure the
hardware, load the software and test the
systems before they are shipped to the UK
and installed in individual hospitals or other
healthcare locations. However, that’s not
the end of the engagement because the
systems are governed by stringent Service
Level Agreements (SLAs).
This situation was created when the UK’s
Department of Health launched its National
Programme for IT, an initiative designed to
move England towards a single, centrallymandated electronic care record for
patients. It split the country into five regions
and nominated five Local Service Providers
(LSPs). Technology services company
Accenture was one of these and was made
the prime contractor to supply IT goods and
services to England’s North East and East
Midlands region. It then sub-contracted
the provision of digital imaging and image
management solutions to Agfa HealthCare
for seven years in a contract that includes
30 Trusts.
“Good support is critical because the
customers need high availability and a
solution they can rely upon,” says Brown.
Solution
Flexibility is the key
Agfa HealthCare needed a comprehensive
support plan and to solve the problem, it
signed a Datacenter Care (DC) contract with
HPE. Initially, this covered just the 30 Trusts
in the LSP agreement but those figures
have more than doubled since DC has been
extended to other Agfa customers who are
not part of the LSP contract.
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