It's helpful to think of PACS as a traditional pyramid market with high-end research and teaching hospitals at the peak. In middle are the bulk of community hospitals and radiology groups. Smaller facilities, imaging centers and practitioners are at the base. While the entire top tier has PACS in some form, sales opportunities lie in their upgrades, and in penetrating the greater number of customers lower down on the pyramid that need affordable solutions.





"Large OEMs at the top serve research institutions, which all have PACS and are digital, but the middle- and low-end market has opened up," says J. Greg Perry, Vice President of Sales, American Medical Sales, Inc., Hawthorne, CA. The company offers a gamut of PACS products including hardware and software, workstations, archives, gateways and web solutions to small hospitals, imaging centers, clinics and physicians. "We don't compete with brand names at the top but the growth in the market is concentrated toward the bottom."

"Most modern, large hospitals have PACS. But it might not have been done as an enterprise-wide or department-wide solution, so there is a lot of churn and upgrading going on in the hospital space," notes Joe Maune, Director of Product Management, Carestream Health, Inc. "As you get into some of the smaller, rural hospitals, those have yet to be penetrated with PACS implementation." Carestream is noted for its complete portfolio of KODAK CARESTREAM RIS and PACS offerings, which can be integrated or purchased separately. Their system includes advanced visualization tools built in so radiologists don't have to open other applications to use diagnostic software.

"Many large hospitals were early adopters and their systems are ripe for replacement," observes Eric Mahler, Philips' Director of Field Marketing for Radiology and Healthcare Informatics. "The technology has matured and solutions are faster and better. The replacement opportunity is larger than net new business." He adds that the useful life of PACS hardware is only about three years so Philips iPACS is priced to include a hardware and software upgrade to give customers confidence that costs won't escalate as new features are needed. "Hospitals are looking for more information, more robust, feature-packed solutions and predictable cost," he says. Philips' PACS is also compatible with most other companies' RIS, HIS, EMR and other applications.

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