by
Joanna Padovano, Reporter | February 20, 2012
From the January/February 2012 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
More mobility than ever
More and more vendors are looking at the possibility of accessing — and even diagnosing — images on a smartphone or tablet.
One example of this would be with GE Healthcare, which recently received 510(k) clearance for its Centricity Radiology Mobile Access 2.0 product, a new mobile imaging diagnostics platform that will allow doctors to diagnose certain patient images from Centricity PACS. This is the first mobile product that has been cleared for primary diagnosis.
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“I think being able to look at images on the iPad is an incredibly powerful tool not for radiologists, but for physicians who are going over the exams with their patients,” says Weill Cornell/New York Presbyterian’s Hentel. “Whether you believe it’s a tool or not — and there’s debate on that — there’s really nothing sexier for a product than to be able to use it on the iPad, and that sells quite a lot.”
Vendor neutral archives
A third significant trend in the PACS
sector has been the rising prevalence of Vendor Neutral Archives. While there are a number of fine points that define what a Vendor Neutral Archive is and what it does, there are two key factors. The first, that the archives can interact with a full array of clinical imaging systems and PACS from other vendors seamlessly and the second, that it can interact with clinical information systems — regardless of vendor — in order to provide filing for reports, results, workflow and more.
“It’s not just about the images,” says GE’s Banks. “It’s also about having storage of clinical documents together with images in this kind of clinical data repository environment, and we think that’s going to give important information pipelines to facilitate the kind of data sharing that’s necessary for Accountable Care Organizations to be successful.”
“You just don’t want a Vendor Neutral Archive as a bucket to put images in,” says Lenny Reznik, director of enterprise imaging and information for Agfa HealthCare. “You want an enterprise-wide archive that has a zero-download viewer for ubiquitous access”
Outpatient and imaging consolidation
Consolidation has been another recent trend in the sector.
