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U.K.’s Massive Diagnostic IT Project

Posted on September 18, 2024September 18, 2024 by Brian Casey

The U.K. is planning a massive project – worth close to $1B – to procure new IT tools for medical diagnostic use. While details of the plan are still sketchy, it involves the acquisition of both radiology and cardiology PACS, as well as AI.

The U.K.’s NHS has become one of the world’s hottest test beds for medical IT adoption as the service struggles to reconcile a static workforce with rising demand for healthcare services.

For example, the NHS last year issued the AI Diagnostic Fund, which provided £21 million ($28M) for a variety of AI implementation projects across 64 NHS trusts.

But the new tender offer dwarfs that investment. NHS has proposed a Digital Diagnostic Solutions project to serve as “a route to market for departmental wide diagnostic IT solutions.”

The value of the project is pegged at £700M ($923M), a massive investment in medical IT by any metric.

The offer is being led by NHS Supply Chain, the governmental agency responsible for procuring medical equipment within the NHS.

The program’s tender offer states that the Digital Diagnostic Solutions project “is to be the new Framework for the Medical IT Departmental Software and Hardware Solutions framework within NHS Supply Chain.”

It includes the following provisions:

Acquisition of radiology PACS, cardiology PACS, RIS, cardiovascular information systems (CVIS), laboratory information management systems (LIMS), and vendor-neutral archives (VNAs).
Software acquired through the program “will sit alongside” other capital equipment like X-ray, MRI, and CT systems.
It will also include 3D software, diagnostic AI software, and endoscopy image management applications.

Publication of an invitation to tender will happen in December 2024, and the contract award will be in July 2025, with the framework itself starting in August 2025.

The tender offer was published just a few days before a government-commissioned report that said the NHS was in “serious trouble” and that was harshly critical of the system’s transformation to digital operation.

And that report came after a July election that saw the Labour party win power for the first time in 14 years – raising hopes that it would approach NHS funding differently than the previous Conservative governments.

The Takeaway

Does the Digital Diagnostic Solutions project represent a new commitment to funding IT innovation from the Labour government? Or is it simply a rebranding of the NHS’ existing procurement activities? Stay tuned.

Indies Surge in Imaging IT

Posted on June 26, 2024June 26, 2024 by Brian Casey

The market for medical imaging IT technology continues to shift, with a pair of surging independent players growing rapidly in a sector that’s long been dominated by multinational OEMs. That’s according to the latest report on the imaging IT market by UK market intelligence firm Signify Research.

The new report is projecting that the global market for imaging information technology will grow 18% over the next few years, from $5.6B in 2023 to $6.6B in 2028.

Radiology will continue to dominate with a majority of sales, with cardiology IT a distant – but growing – second. Advanced visualization and operational workflow tools will make up the rest.

In terms of vendors, the top three market leaders of 2023 were GE HealthCare, Philips, and Fujifilm, but more recently, Visage Imaging and Sectra have been gaining market share.

The report echoes recent news that has seen some of the largest multi-site enterprise imaging installations going to Visage and Sectra; a recent KLAS Research report also showed both companies’ growing momentum.

Some of the other major points from the report include …

Major growth in cloud deployment will occur – by 2028, 37% of the global imaging IT market will be in either hybrid or fully hosted environments
Cloud will represent 44% of the total radiology IT market by 2028
On a regional basis, the Middle East will see “significant growth” in imaging IT from 2024 to 2026, particularly in the Gulf States
Recovery is expected in China and the ASEAN nations, while India’s growing economy is driving healthcare digitization
Latin America is showing rising interest in AI and cloud technologies, but national elections could complicate matters

The Takeaway
The new Signify Research report underscores the evolving nature of the imaging IT market, as independent vendors rise to challenge multinational OEMs that dominated the sector for years. Be sure to check out Signify’s helpful infographic on LinkedIn that succinctly wraps up the changes.

Imaging IT’s Infrastructure Problem

Posted on September 25, 2022October 13, 2023 by Jake Fishman

A heated Twitter conversation revealed widespread discontent with imaging’s outdated and fragmented IT infrastructure, suggesting that it’s draining radiologist productivity and standing in the way of AI adoption.

This tweet by Memorial Sloan Kettering’s Anton Becker, MD, PhD got things started: “95% of radiology departments would do well to direct 100% of their AI efforts and budget towards upgrade and maintenance of PACS, RIS and dictation software for the next 5 years… Our field is plagued by legacy software.”

And here’s what the ensuing replies and retweets revealed:

PACS Productivity – Nearly everyone agreed that their overall imaging IT setup was insufficient, with one rad estimating that a “supercharged PACS” would improve his productivity by 30%, and another noting that workflow customization would “at least double” her speed and accuracy.

Imaging IT Revolution – Some called upon the “legacy” PACS, RIS, and voice recognition vendors to make more “revolutionary changes,” rather than settling for tweaks to current setups. Others proposed government intervention.

IT Isn’t Flashy – One thing that might be holding some imaging IT overhauls back is “it’s not as flashy to boast” about high-quality infrastructure, and “the people who have authority to allocate resources are more motivated by flash than function.”

Holistic IT – Eventually the conversation led to several well received proposals that we “eliminate the idea of PACS as a category and start thinking more holistically about radiology IT.” In other words, this might be more of a “fragmentation problem” than a PACS/RIS/voice functionality problem (or an AI budget problem).

The Takeaway

Even if RadTwitter tends to skew towards academic radiologists and often focuses on what’s going wrong, this conversation indicates widespread dissatisfaction with current imaging IT setups, and suggests that radiologist productivity (and perhaps accuracy and burnout) would improve significantly if imaging IT worked as they’d like it to work.

It’s debatable whether this imaging IT problem is actually due to an unnecessary focus on AI (very little of the conversation actually focused on AI), but it does seem reasonable that rad teams with solid infrastructure would be more likely to embrace AI.

Intelerad’s Reporting Play

Posted on August 17, 2022October 13, 2023 by Jake Fishman

Intelerad continued its M&A streak, acquiring radiology reporting company, PenRad Technologies, in a relatively small deal that might have a much bigger impact than some think.

PenRad has a solid share of the breast and lung cancer screening reporting segments, making it a target of a number of PACS vendors in recent years.

The acquisition is another example of Intelerad using its private equity backing to complete its informatics portfolio, following a series of deals that allowed its expansions into new clinical areas (cardiac, OB/GYN), regions (UK), technologies (cloud), and functionalities (image sharing, cloud VNA).

Adding PenRad will immediately give Intelerad three proven cancer screening reporting solutions to offer to its PACS customers, while bringing Intelerad into an untold number of PenRad accounts that it didn’t work with before now.

The deal’s long-term impact will likely be dictated by how well Intelerad integrates and enhances its new PenRad technologies. If Intelerad is able to seamlessly integrate its PACS/worklist with PenRad’s dictation/reporting, it could create a truly unique advantage — especially if Intelerad expands its reporting capabilities beyond just cancer screening.

Intelerad’s PenRad acquisition and Sirona’s unified radiology platform also highlight the differentiating role that integrated reporting might play in future enterprise imaging portfolios, although there aren’t many more reporting companies still available for acquisition.

The Takeaway

Informatics veterans might point out that it’s much easier to acquire a portfolio of companies than it is to integrate all that software — and they’d be correct. That said, most would also agree that Intelerad has assembled a uniquely comprehensive enterprise imaging portfolio and it would be extremely well-positioned if/when that portfolio becomes fully integrated.

Tag: PACS

U.K.’s Massive Diagnostic IT Project

Indies Surge in Imaging IT

Imaging IT’s Infrastructure Problem

Intelerad’s Reporting Play

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