by
John R. Fischer, Senior Reporter | February 05, 2018
From the January/February 2018 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
With many organizations working together to develop and integrate new standards for interoperability, a standards-based solution is best.
“We’re seeing a lot of the more innovative vendors play friendly because they can more easily adjust their products to support datasets that may not be entirely compliant with standards such as HL7 or DICOM,” Steve Deaton, president of Healthcare IT at Konica Minolta HealthCare Americas, Inc., told HCB News regarding his company’s imaging IT technology. “I think a lot of legacy vendors out there have not updated their platforms’ core technology in years, and they often do not even support any standard for exporting data such as prior radiology reports. We’re playing friendly just by overly accommodating people that are nowhere close to meeting standards such as HL7 or DICOM.”
All of these considerations take their toll on the bottom line, but experts agree that cost is a more dynamic issue than the number on the sticker. Factors such as the scalability that the organization wishes to achieve, what innovations and maintenance will be required for a solution, how long are they feasibly hoping to use their system and what return on investment they hope to gain are all essential to properly crunching the numbers.
Centricity Universal Viewer (product image)
Shifting markets and considerations for tomorrow’s imaging department
The question of whether an enterprise imaging system is a solution for all needs and a replacement of other modalities continues to set off debates on the present and future state of imaging IT technologies.
Although the introduction of enterprise imaging, coupled with the abundance of PACS systems already installed, has taken some of the air out of the conventional PACS/RIS market, a 2016 Transparency Market Research report found those markets will grow from $2.2 billion in 2015 to $3.9 billion by 2024 at a compound annual growth rate of 7 percent, and the Asia Pacific region is leading the way.
One possible reason for this is that developing a RIS requires time and money as well as a large base to sell to in order to justify the investment for one.
“Outside the U.S., it’s still very much a joint RIS/PACS market. RIS and EMRs tend to have a lot of geographic dependencies such as billing, how things are processed, one payor versus multiple payors. The lead EMR in any given country tends to be a local EMR player. That also means, though, that their main geographic scope is that country, so creating a big enough business to also be able to invest in building a RIS in addition to an EMR is challenging. The scale of the US is obviously different and that gives you enough revenue and income to be able to invest in periphery areas around the core EMR, like RIS,” said David Hale, leader of enterprise imaging, cardiology IT, high acuity care and perinatal software businesses globally at GE Healthcare.”
