Emageon to Move Beyond PACS

February 2004, Birmingham, AL -- Although the big news from Emageon lately has been a flurry of new contracts with some high profile hospitals and IDNs, the company's focus is firmly on the future.

Given the spate of contracts - in the last two months, the company has inked deals with Thedacare, a central Wisconsin IDN, BJC Healthcare in St. Louis, Meriter Hospital in Madison, Wisconsin, to name just three - one might expect Emageon to exploit its industry niche, emphasizing sales over new development. Think again.

"We've moved beyond PACS," says Emageon Vice President Thomas Pickard, referring to the company's new mantra of extending imaging across the 'ologies' - or more formally, of creating enterprise image management systems. "This is the idea of going beyond imaging and getting into the places that produce and distribute images."

Genesys Healthcare Vice President and CIO Dave Holland, an Emageon customer, is unreserved in his praise.

"Emageon is out in front again with their vision for building an 'intelligent visual medical system.' Now that we can serve clinicians with the movement of data, how can we assist the clinicians in the interpretation of the data? While Emageon's current system improves clinical quality by reducing time and costs of clinical work, the next generation of Emageon's software will improve clinical quality by assisting clinicians in the analysis and diagnosis of clinical data."

Of course, it's not surprising that Emageon stresses forward thinking. The company's roots grew out of a development program at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, in 1997. At that time, academics were trying to provide better image access to neurosurgeons.

"They were computer scientists," Pickard says. "They weren't even aware of the issues we talk about today."

At about the same time that Emageon was spun off as a for-profit company, UltraVisual Medical Systems (based in Madison) was also taking shape. The companies were a perfect complement, and worked closely together on technology until they merged in May, 2002.

While academics are often portrayed as head-in-the-cloud thinkers, sheltered from reality in their ivory towers, Emageon has clearly shown that progressive thinking can give companies a head start when new technologies emerge. In its case, the company was well situated when two trends hit the PACS market - first, there's suddenly a greater demand for imaging in disciplines seeking to avoid invasive surgeries. For instance, the big news out of RSNA, Pickard notes, was the virtual colonoscopy. That followed the information explosion created by procedures such as breast and cardio MRs and CT angiograms.

"You're seeing a real morphing of modalities," Pickard says. "The only way to deal with the changes is with advanced imaging capabilities... Referring physicians and specialists are all demanding better tools."

The second trend is a purchasing move away from departmental buys in favor of an IT-centric approach. "It's a little more challenging to bring all the parties into a room together," Pickard notes, But it works in Emageon's favor, he says, because the company can talk about the distribution of tools (which clinicians want) and the use of open standards (which IT departments want).

The company's latest innovation is what it calls the intelligent visual medical system. Unlike conventional PACS, Emageon's system distributes more than images and reports - it uses thin-client technology to move the tools to manipulate images and data to the desktops of the clinicians who need them. The approach is winning kudos from clients like Holland. "Emageon's strategy of building an enterprise repository and tools to allow ... automation have been a step ahead of the competition," he says.

Danny Meadows, director of radiology at Brookwood Hospital, said his hospital (and three OP Dx centers), sees a similar future. "We have just expanded to add Cath and Non-Invasive Cardiology to the Emageon archive," he said. "Our goal is to move to a common viewing platform for PACS, RIS, workstation, dictation, etc. This is the way that most of the interest will move."

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