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.
