Game of Thrones

On the exhibit floor, more vendors discussed new partnerships than new technology, turning the exhibits into a kind of Game of Thrones (without the prurient interest), with alliances forming daily. Bayer Healthcare announced a partnership with dose-monitoring software company Radimetrics at SIIM, bolstering It's goal of bringing it's QC, BI, patient-centered solution to the market. "Our first foray is dose management solutions," says Anthony Cinalli, Bayer veep of strategic marketing, informatics. Bayer began by acquiring Medrad and its Certegra product for managing the use of contrast, from setup at the power injector to execution management (including protocols), through storing the data at the point of view (including contrast delivered, flow rate, and adverse events during procedures) and making it available to the enterprise for trend analysis. With the Radimetrics relationship, Bayer adds radiation dose management, bringing a fuller solution to it's customer base. Nuance also announced a strategic relationship with Radimetrics at SIIM. McKesson, the nation's largest healthcare only company, has finished integrating it's newest acquisition, PeerVue, into Horizon Medical Imaging solution, offering the ability to define a workflow with QA and critical results notification without any re-coding, says Bob Baumgartner, MBA. Other applications the solution can offer through partnership include the Teramedica VNA, Nuance PowerScribe, and Vital Images AV. Carestream is partnering with Intel at the processor level to improve the performance of it's cloud offering by 28%, says Christine Kao. "Carestream has the second-largest vendor neutral archive in the world," Kao states, with 80 million studies totaling 2 petabytes of data. The vendor-neutral, standards-based archive can be configured as a public or private cloud, enabling image viewing from any place, any platform by any clinician via the company's zero-footprint FDA approved image viewer, Vue Motion. Agfa is partnering with Dell to provide the backend (data center, VNA) for it's ICIS image management platform, in place at the Cleveland Clinic, Loma Linda, Oschner, USF and UCI. Designed to provide a workflow layer between the EMR and the departmental PACS, ICIS is not even in radiology at UCI and USF, says Agfa's Lenny Reznick. "We recommend that sites start outside of radiology, in pathology or dermatology," he says, Siemens announced a partnership with Dell for it's Image Sharing and Archiving offering, developed with HIEs in mind, enabled with XDS-I.b to support the federated model of image sharing. Rik Primo says Siemens has been in the business of hosting HIS since the late 70s, and maintains a massive data center. The company loaded Dell's InSite One software onto its servers in its data center, as well, bringing DICOM domain knowledge to the partnership. Dell, one of the vendors with the fullest dance cards, didn't even exhibit this year at SIIM. Reportedly, Dell is partnering its data center and image sharing software with Acuo's and Teramedica's VNAs. John Danahy reports that Peake Healthcare just inked a deal with Vital Imaging, making the AV solution the fifth SAS application available from the Peake image aggregation platform. A JV between Johns Hopkins and Harris Consulting, Peake's VNA as a hosted service also offers users applications from Calgary Scientific, Merge, Medicalis and itMD. GE Healthcare's Jim Corrigan, HIT GM, offered insight into what is driving the fundamental shift from new products to new partners: "Our investment is from customer-problem in, not product out." For GE, this means an increased focus on building reference and show sites through deepened customer relationships, such as GE's relationship with UPMC and the resulting OMNYX platform for digital pathology.