Intelerad has grown significantly in recent years, riding the enterprise imaging wave and often displacing legacy PACS solutions from incumbents slow to adopt a platform-focused approach to radiology IT. It has done especially well in the outpatient and small community hospital segment in the U.S., while also targeting larger acute providers after success at large Canadian acute hospitals and other international markets such as the U.K. Based on this experience and fueled by new investment from owners Hg Capital, it is clearly looking to stay ahead of the competition in cloud technology.

Intelerad has only a small proportion of its customers using hosted cloud deployments so far but expects to increase this share significantly in the coming years, accelerated by the Radius acquisition. By integrating Radius’ technology, Intelerad believes it can offer additional managed service options outside of just software. Given that total cost of ownership (TCO) for long-term deals is a growing factor in radiology IT procurement, particularly in the evolving outpatient segment.


Bringing a specialist imaging IT cloud vendor such as Radius in-house will also have some advantages, namely in product development and ensuring Intelerad’s product offerings and platform can, in the future, match the performance and functionality of on-premise deployments. Given there are relatively few firms with the same sector experience as Radius, Intelerad is getting a head start on its competition. Radius also has experience working with Intelerad’s competitors on off-premise cloud implementations, experience that should help offer a competitive edge in future deals.

Once complete, Intelerad will be able to offer on-premise, off-premise private (via Radius) and off-premise public (via Amazon AWS) cloud offerings. Given health providers are yet to be fully convinced of public cloud offerings (particularly in relation to imaging IT), with lingering concerns over security, data ownership and long-term cost with non-healthcare specialists, the Radius deal fills a clear void in the Intelerad offering. It also plays well to the brand Intelerad is marketing, as a disruptive, flexible offering that can adapt to the specific needs of user groups, based on modularity and “elasticity” of solution.

We see this having most impact in the large radiology group customer segment, where TCO and cloud adoption score highly in vendor ranking for deals. As this sector is also experiencing substantial consolidation, we expect to see more mid- to large-scale deals come to market in the near-term.

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