Report: Hospitals don't want to be locked into one imaging vendor

July 27, 2009 | Bernie Monegain, Editor

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OREM, UT – Hospitals are considering vendor-neutral solutions for archiving and accessing medical images to avoid being locked into closed, proprietary software, according to a new report from KLAS.

In "Enterprise Imaging: A Vendor Reality Check," the Orem, Utah-based healthcare research firm examines the enterprise imaging (EI) market, which delivers access to medical images across hospital departments, and explores the vendor solutions that healthcare providers are considering.

The study found that while many providers are looking to their picture archiving and communications system (PACS) vendor as a likely EI partner, they also recognize the potential pitfalls of getting locked into a proprietary solution that may not translate well from one department to another.

Philips was the most frequently mentioned EI vendor, followed by GE, McKesson, EMC, FUJIFILM, Agfa, IBM, Siemens, AMICAS (Emageon) and HP.

Philips, in particular, poses interesting questions for providers. As the vendor most frequently associated with enterprise imaging, Philips offers widely deployed solutions in PACS, cardiology PACS and other areas. At the same time, the company had the highest number of clients considering replacing its cardiology solution, and the company’s cardiology strategy has been criticized for being confusing and fragmented.

“Traditional PACS vendors like Philips, GE, McKesson and FUJIFILM were frequently mentioned by providers as likely candidates for an EI solution,” said Ben Brown, general manager of imaging informatics for KLAS and author of the new EI report. “But those same providers were also adamant that they want to own their image data and not leave it hostage to the PACS vendor."

Brown said hospitals are beginning to take ownership of their medical images by building PACS-neutral archives and storage management layers.

“This approach allows the PACS to simply become a physician-friendly viewing and interaction layer that can be upgraded or replaced without the typically painful migration,” Brown said.

Outside of PACS, providers also referenced storage and archiving solution vendors, such as EMC, IBM and HP, as potential EI partners. Each company has partnered with middleware vendors – EMC with Acuo and IBM and HP with Bycast – to deliver vendor-neutral archiving products that federate data from DICOM application or storage layers.

Similar solutions from DeJarnette and TeraMedica are also popular with providers, according to the report. In addition, as the amount of imaging data being archived continues to grow, providers have looked to outsource their archive and image management to companies like GE, InSite One and Philips.

The KLAS report notes that while radiology, nuclear medicine and cardiology enjoy significant adoption of digital imaging management, other departments such as oncology, endoscopy and pathology are still fairly immature in their use of the technology. Among those, digital pathology brings with it a number of unique challenges, including enormous data sets that can adversely affect image distribution and transfer speeds. Some industry experts estimate that pathology images represent a larger data volume than all other imaging specialties combined.

Reader Comments (4)Login to Post a Comment

JMM says: Closed systems drive higher costs

March 11, 2011 | 9:52AM GMT

This problem is pervasive in healthcare. Look at the big lab networks.
They use technology (sometimes free, sometimes not) to insulate customers from competition. The Open Source Trend has to be embraced faster for our healthcare system to survive.
Why should a hospital or health plan pay for another large expensive data warehouse to report every functional record-keeping and reporting need?
Until we standardize and unify data and find other ways to differentiate as healthcare vendors and service providers, we are part of the problem. Not part of the solution.

Satin says: Watch out for Imposters

July 29, 2009 | 4:39PM GMT

DICOM is the path to success. Dont be fooled by the imposters that attach to the PACS with a CIFS or NFS mount point. That approach propogates the proprietary Schema of the PACS vendor with the images and reduces the available metadata needed for ILM.

Only 3 middleware vendors strickly adhere to DICOM and only one is DICOM end to end with the ability to preserve and morph private tags.

TomMariner says: Hospitals don't want to be Locked in

July 27, 2009 | 3:25PM GMT

The reason we invented DICOM (OK NEMA / ACR originally) was so that not only could various modalities communicate within a facility, but records could be shared. It should be of no surprise to anyone that we are in the midst of a (needed in my opinion) demand that we can talk across facility lines and across functional lines with our imaging and imaging results.

The current thinking is an IHE / HL7 / DICOM / HITSP standards set that will free Hospitals from getting locked in -- unless they think the additional feature set, reliability, pricing, etc. makes sense to go with a one-stop solution.

Bottom line is that the compatibility is going to get real good real soon.

Green_Leaf says: vendor-neutral archiving products

July 27, 2009 | 12:45PM GMT

It is good to see that hospitals are recognizing that imaging is an enterprise application and not just limited to radiology. I have been urging my clients to look for vendor-neutral archiving solutions and PACS vendors that can use these archives to retrieve prior studies.

Most migrations of data sets exceeding 10 years of historical data usually take one or more years to migrate. During this time the legacy system must be maintained and the migratated data validated. This all contributes to an expensive process not to mention the manhours consumed.

I hope that the DICOM standards committee will provide the needed guidance for visible light to address the very large data sets coming from other specialties which include a large amount of video.