Philips has also been one of the first vendors in the market to actively promote itself as a single-vendor partner offering a consolidated central clinical IT platform for all diagnostic and clinical information. While it has yet to manage to incorporate its broader product portfolio into a seamless offering, the Carestream HCIS acquisition is unlikely to do any harm to this strategy. Instead, the Carestream technical expertise around multiple clinical department integration and data management should, in the long-term, improve the ability of the broader Philips informatics offering in interoperability, integration and data management maturity. This is no bad thing and should help move the current view of the existing Philips platform as being monolithic and proprietary toward a more open and agnostic solution. This will also better serve Philips’ long-term strategy, which is to be viewed as a leading partner across clinical and diagnostic sectors.

However, the transition and integration will not be easy. Philips should tread lightly when it comes to the existing Carestream customer base in the short-term, as opposed to trying to immediately transition customers to the Intellispace portfolio. It must also have an adaptable strategy in terms of product portfolio, looking to maximise the best components of each platform to retain its existing base in this highly competitive marketplace. In the medium-term, we would expect Philips to maintain a two-tier strategy, with the Vue platform evolving into an “Intellispace Lite” product, enabling Philips to compete in lower-tier segments in North America and to address emerging markets with a more flexible, modular product line.


Thus, on paper, the combination of Philips and Carestream HCIS appears to offer a significant opportunity for Philips to primarily broaden its customer base and upsell from its broader healthcare portfolio. It will also put Philips right at the top in terms of global market share in imaging IT in terms of revenue, a daunting challenge to its largest competitors GE Healthcare, Siemens Healthineers, Fujifilm Medical Systems and Canon Medical. How long it stays there could well come down to the decisions it makes in the next two years; get it wrong and the competitiveness of the market means there will be plenty of vendors waiting to pounce.

About the author: Steve Holloway is principal analyst for Signify Research, an independent supplier of market intelligence and consultancy to the global healthcare technology industry. Signify's major coverage areas are Healthcare IT, Medical Imaging and Digital Health. Our clients include technology vendors, healthcare providers and payers, management consultants and investors. Signify Research is headquartered in Cranfield, U.K.

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