Merge Healthcare Leads in Vendor-Neutral Archive Market

Jon DeVries is vice president of Solutions Management for Merge Healthcare, which is a leading provider of innovative enterprise imaging and interoperability solutions. “This was more than twice the market share of the next largest competitor, and was based on Merge’s 13 billion images stored in VNAs globally with another 150 million images added every month,” he reported in an interview.

iConnect VNA archives enterprise-wide images from disparate PACS, specialties and sites, providing a consolidated view of a patient’s images and reports. “This allows physicians to quickly access current and historical images at the point of care,” added Mr. DeVries.

As imaging has matured, clients are moving from a focus on individual department level solutions to those that work across a whole connected enterprise. Mr. DeVries pointed out that this was a unique feature of Merge Healthcare’s iConnect suite of solutions.

Their enterprise-wide offering includes iConnect VNA, Share, and Access. “We want to deploy these across the entire ecosystem. We can be a single vendor with best-of-breed department products, but in addition, take an enterprise-wide view.”

This defining characteristic of Merge differs from competitor companies, which often provide one solution at a time. In the case of an institution needing an entire strategy, they might require 5-10 different vendors to compile the whole solution.

To illustrate how this enterprise-wide system might work in practice, Mr. DeVries described how a real-life iConnect solution might work. “Take a skiing accident where a patient is imaged in the local resort clinic before transport to a nearby emergency department at the main hospital. Images of the injury might be needed in the main hospital to expedite treatment later on. In this case, our enterprise-wide system would enable electronic sending of the image to the main hospital ahead of the patient’s arrival to facilitate triage.”

Stroke provides another example. Patients make the best recoveries if they are treated with particular drugs within a narrow window of opportunity. “Saving 30 minutes makes a big difference to clinical outcomes, so sharing images across a network to get the best care in a timely way is very important,” noted Mr. DeVries.

Merge has a robust and well-respected history in the field of healthcare informatics. The company was one of the founders of the Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) protocol, used to mandate how images are communicated and stored.

“Due to this historical experience, we understand all the different departments within a hospital,” points out Mr. DeVries. “We understand how cardiology differs from radiology or orthopedics and so on. We have been producing vendor neutral archive platforms for about 12 years and we have 13 billion exams stored in client sites.”

Discussing future trends and directions, Mr. DeVries said they are seeing a movement towards subscription models where people pay per click, rather than paying upfront for the system. “Lots of institutions get paid as they image so this matches their costs to their revenue.” Merge is currently piloting this subscription pricing system.

We also see an emerging trend to break down department level silos and centralize PACS storage. “Images account for 80% of data captured by healthcare enterprises. All these images are scattered around in pockets which makes them difficult to manage and for clinicians to easily access a patient’s set of images from the EMR,” said Mr. DeVries.

iConnect Access, is Merge’s enable easy-to-access browsing solution wherever and whenever images are needed. “On iPad, desktop, laptop whatever, you can pull up the images,” he said.

“It’s all about changing image data into knowledge.”

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