From the January/February 2016 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
Interestingly, some of the biggest vendors in the electronic health record/electronic medical record (EHR/EMR) space, including Cerner, Epic , Allscripts, and others, either do not offer products, or are not considered by most to be major players in the electronic imaging (EI) space. Of the top 10 vendors identified by Beckers Health IT and CIO review, only GE and McKesson are considered players in the EI space. It would be nice to think that will change with a few pending acquisitions on the horizon, but the reality is that most of these vendors prefer to play in the space they are comfortable in and instead maintain Swiss neutrality with all vendors and interface to every market player instead.
Agfa is under the umbrella of convergence and knows it has to play with everyone. Reznik said, “The days of specialty standalone vendors are limited. When we look at the IT space in general it is the platform vendors (Epic, Cerner, et al.), from an applications standpoint, who are the longterm winners in the EHR space, not the imaging players, so we all need to play well together.”
The cloud has always been a major area of interest, but interestingly, many vendors use it for remote hosting vs. primary data and image storage. This is not universal by any means, but just an overall trend. INFINITT, for example, sees customers moving to a hybrid version of the cloud with a combination of on-site and some off-site storage. “Customers want to keep control of their data, but the volume of data is growing too large, plus they also need offsite backup. No one wants to go back to tape. One of our large university hospitals will keep 1 years’ data on site with a special caching server while all other data resides in the cloud,” said Smarro.
Where the technology is heading is a matter of intense interest for vendors and end users alike. Siemens’ Brusco summed up what every other vendor felt. “PACS is continuing to evolve toward providing more intelligent tools, automated workflows, and the ability to read diagnostic images from remote locations. Enterprise Imaging continues to evolve from basic DICOM VNA functionality into more modular solutions that can provide additional benefits such as multimedia archiving, zero-footprint viewing, image exchange, patient portal, multifunction and batch importing, and other related capabilities.”
PACS continues to evolve to meet the ever-changing demands of an evolving marketplace. The future for PACS is different for sure, but remains bright for a technology that few, if any, feel they can live without anymore.
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