HIMSS recap: Fujifilm provided attendees with state-of-the-art technologies and daily presentations

HIMSS 2017 was in Orlando, Fla., last month, and officials at FUJIFILM Medical Systems U.S.A., Inc. say it was yet another hugely successful show for the company.

Greg Strowig, vice president of the company’s TeraMedica Division, says the company looks forward to HIMSS each and every year.

“HIMSS gives us the opportunity to highlight our latest developments and newest strategies for addressing issues in healthcare and healthcare IT,” Strowig says. “What excites us the most about HIMSS is its reach. It’s a chance to have access to the broadest audience perspective, because you have both domestic attendees and international attendees. We have the opportunity to interact with attendees, discuss our technologies, and show how the technologies integrate. It lets people see the complete workflow.”

That complete workflow is crucial for Fujifilm, Strowig explains, because it ties into the company’s new enterprise imaging strategy.

“Fujifilm is trying to really take a complete, 360° view of enterprise imaging,” Strowig says. “We’re trying to look at the customer’s needs as a whole and provide an end-to-end strategy that can then be fulfilled by the different solutions we offer. It’s important in today’s world for customers to start taking a holistic view of enterprise imaging. We want to make ourselves one of the key providers of that enterprise imaging strategy, whether they choose to use every one of our products or not.”

Innovation on display

Fujifilm also had several new solutions on display at HIMSS, including its recently-released Synapse® 5 PACS. Strowig notes that Synapse 5 is a revolutionary upgrade but not a completely new product, so existing users don’t have to worry about a long install process, migrating all of their data, or potentially disrupting patient care. He adds, however, that this is much more than just a basic update; this is a big next step for both Fujifilm and the medical imaging industry as a whole.

“Synapse 5 takes PACS to the next level,” Strowig says. “It’s the next generation of PACS, where all of the information and the image presentation is done through server-side rendering. This allows for extremely high-speed delivery of images to the desktop, and in addition, we’re not delivering the entire data set to the users, so the bandwidth utilization is dramatically lower. You can imagine how something like that—lower bandwidth and higher performance—can improve patient care and work extremely well in situations where you might have physicians working from home or away from the office.”

In addition, Synapse 5 can be operated from any web browser, whether it be a Mac, PC, or mobile device. Also, it has diagnostic breast tomosynthesis and MPR/Fusion integrated into the PACS. These attributes represent a “groundbreaking change,” Strowig says.

Fujifilm also highlighted version 6.2 of its Synapse® VNA, which includes new administration tools and the ability to establish a new VNA in a matter of minutes. The company took a “more standardized approach” to the setup functions with version 6.2, pulling several complexities out of the setup process and so that users can get their VNA up and running as fast as possible. Strowig notes that all of the VNA’s detailed settings and flexibility are still intact and available to change if users prefer to refine the configuration as they desire.

Another significant development of Fujifilm’s TeraMedica Division is the new Synapse® VNA Connext Mobile application, which allows physicians to capture photos at the point of care, whether it is for dermatology, wound care, or any other situation that requires documentation.

“We are finding that a lot of physicians are unfortunately using their personal cell phone to capture these images,” Strowig says. “So this app is a completely secure environment within an iPad or an iPhone and it is completely integrated with a site’s electronic medical record system (EMR), so users can get a departmental worklist right on the device. And they don’t have to type in patient information or anything, because it is all already presented right there.”

Connext Mobile is also fully integrated with Epic’s Haiku and Canto modules, allowing the Fujifilm software to work seamlessly in the Epic mobile environment.