However, while the Radius deal does no harm to Intelerad’s broader efforts to penetrate the mid, large and academic acute health provider segment in the U.S., other barriers to entry remain. Most notably, its lack of best-of-breed diagnostic tools and advanced visualisation offerings will exclude the firm from some deals, especially recognizing the focus of healthcare providers on supply chain consolidation.

Moreover, as is the case with many radiology IT vendors, Intelerad has not found a way to broaden its clinical reach into areas such as cardiology, pathology, oncology or surgery; areas its largest competitors already have substantial offerings or partnerships in. Noting that large health providers are focusing more on enterprise imaging strategies long-term, Intelerad will need a broader clinical offering or established partnership in place in order to cement itself as the foundation to large acute customers in the U.S. market.


In the meantime, a successful implementation of Radius looks likely to improve its competitiveness in the smaller U.S. customer segments near-term.

Change Healthcare acquires Nucleus.io

• Change Healthcare announces acquisition of Nucleus.io for an undisclosed fee on 19th August 2020
• Nuclues.io includes cloud-based image exchange and cloud-based diagnostic viewer solutions; Nucleus Health will continue to run StatRad teleradiology business independently.
• The Nucleus.io product is reported to be live at 7,000 customer sites; the firm announced at RSNA 2019 (November 2019) capability of its Nucleus.io solution to offer native cloud “PACS-like” functionality.

The Signify view:
News broke that Change Healthcare had committed to rollout of a new “cloud native” imaging IT platform with a select group of development customers at RSNA 2019 (November 2019). Timescales for a full rollout to its large U.S. customer base was unclear at the time. This prompting many industry commentators to suggest “cloud native” was a mere marketing ploy, intended to garner new interest for the Change Healthcare imaging IT portfolio, still shaking off the legacy of its spin-off from McKesson.

The announcement of its acquisition of Nucleus.io last month, a relatively small image exchange and universal viewing vendor, has signaled Change Healthcare is in fact very serious in its push to transition to the cloud.

Nucleus.io has gradually built a solid customer base in the outpatient and radiology reading group market, leveraging its longer-running StatRad teleradiology business as a development bed for product roll-out and product showcasing. It was also one of the first in the industry to embrace cloud-only deployment, with a strong partnership with Microsoft Azure as the core of its platform architecture.

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