Konica Minolta Healthcare moves into enterprise imaging powered by AWS

Konica Minolta Healthcare is introducing Exa Enterprise, a new enterprise imaging solution that encompasses the Exa PACS-RIS core powered by AWS’s proven cloud solution and its data. This new enterprise cloud solution will deliver exceptionally fast access to data and boost efficiency across imaging specialties.

Konica Minolta’s work with AWS enables the company to offer a highly scalable, web-based platform with state-of-the-art cybersecurity measures. Konica Minolta's Exa Enterprise platform leverages AWS HealthImaging, which is HIPAA-eligible and provides rapid access to petabyte-scale medical imaging data from anywhere. This integration enables healthcare organizations to drive innovation faster while reducing the challenges and expenses associated with managing medical image data.

With HealthImaging, Konica Minolta’s customers can increase image storage savings, image retrieval speeds, and data security through a centralized, secure, and compliant access point for their medical imaging data.

Prime features set Exa Enterprise apart from other solutions.

  • Tailored for hospitals up to 500 beds, and hospital-owned and large imaging centers
  • Built for speed, high volume imaging and scalability
  • Amplified with best-in-class partner solutions for VNA, universal viewer, advanced visualization, image sharing, AI-powered workflow orchestration, business intelligence and speech and reporting
  • Supported by an open API that tightly integrates the ecosystem and server-side rendering to speed access and radiologists’ reads

“With specialization in integrated PACS-RIS and private cloud services for imaging centers, including several national, multi-state and independently owned chains, we’re well-positioned to design and develop the platform of the future,” says Kevin Chlopecki, Chief Operating Officer, Konica Minolta HCIT

Kevin Chlopecki

“This enterprise ecosystem [integrated PACS-RIS and cloud] provides customers with optimal solutions based on their needs and specialties. We see this enabling our customers to clinically advance their practice across the hospital or imaging center.”

Kevin Chlopecki, Chief Operating Officer, Konica Minolta HCIT 

“This enterprise ecosystem provides customers with optimal solutions based on their needs and specialties. We see this enabling our customers to clinically advance their practice across the hospital or imaging center.”

“Today, we’re managing nearly 3 petabytes of data in our data centers, which includes multicenter imaging practices with hundreds of thousands of studies flowing in and out of our private cloud every day,” Chlopecki says. “We've demonstrated that the Exa Platform can easily handle large study volumes that scales as needed and have developed the foundation to expand to the enterprise with AWS.” 

That partnership is central to enabling a scalable web-based platform and state-of-the-art cybersecurity protections. AWS HealthImaging for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) provides facilities with significant storage savings and exceptional speed. With server-side rendering, the Exa Enterprise platform provides fast access to images, regardless of file size. DICOM data is not transmitted to individual workstations, increasing data security and patient privacy.

For the vendor neutral archive, Konica Minolta partners with Apollo Enterprise Imaging. It’s Apollo’s arcc that facilitates the organization and accessibility of medical imaging data and digital asset management across multiple image-generating departments with a unified viewer. 

“We want to scale not only the resources, but feature functionality,” Chlopecki notes. “Each customer can decide how they want to orchestrate their workflow by individual radiologist preferences and clinical priorities. Our image sharing platform delivers images to any authorized stakeholder and advanced analytics provides actionable insights for data-driven decision-making.”

While the benefits are many, it’s the synergy of pairing Exa Enterprise in the cloud via AWS, the most secure global cloud infrastructure, and Apollo, the leader in clinical workflow solutions, that stretches across radiology practices, imaging centers and hospitals to improve patient outcomes and boost practice efficiency and business operations. 

As Chlopecki sees it: “We focus on workflow and AWS provides the infrastructure so we can deliver the tailored tools that radiologists need to work smarter and better. Our solution enables imaging business teams to improve patient flow, identify trends, reduce costs and use data to make decisions more efficiently. AWS is a cloud they trust. And through this new enterprise imaging solution, we are delivering exactly what imaging groups and small to medium-sized hospitals are asking for and deploying today.”

For more information, visit: https://healthcare.konicaminolta.us/healthcare-it-landing

Around the web

The patient, who was being cared for in the ICU, was not accompanied or monitored by nursing staff during his exam, despite being sedated.

The nuclear imaging isotope shortage of molybdenum-99 may be over now that the sidelined reactor is restarting. ASNC's president says PET and new SPECT technologies helped cardiac imaging labs better weather the storm.

CMS has more than doubled the CCTA payment rate from $175 to $357.13. The move, expected to have a significant impact on the utilization of cardiac CT, received immediate praise from imaging specialists.