Analyst Insights and Signify Premium Insights

Recent hype about cloud technology has yet to materialise in clinical and diagnostic healthcare IT. For advanced visualisation in medical imaging especially, the public cloud hosted solutions accounted for less than 5% of the total US market in 2017, and in the rest of the world, even less.

Here’s the Signify View on these two announcements.

As AI gains traction in the medical imaging market, and its benefits for clinical diagnosis and more accurate early disease detection are being better understood by healthcare stakeholders, it is no longer a question of will AI be used, but rather how will it be deployed.

It was only last year that Analogic was celebrating 50 years as a significant player in the medical imaging supply chain, supporting the extensive growth of the X-ray, CT and MRI markets globally with innovative engineering and unique products. However, the last decade of its history has seen a tumultuous period for the firm with a now uncertain future under new private investment owners.

As news broke of the first GE Healthcare business unit to be sold, some may have been underwhelmed both by the scale and symbolism of this deal. However, this first announcement does provide some useful indicators for what to expect from the future of GE Healthcare with John Flannery at the helm.

Wandering the exhibition floor this year, any outsider to the health IT industry would have assumed interoperability was a problem already solved. Exhibitors across the hall boasted ever-growing portfolios of clinical, diagnostic and operational software, all of which seemingly could be implemented and interconnected simply and efficiently.

We explore some of the partnerships that were announced at HIMSS in detail a little later, but to understand what’s driving this, it’s first important to understand the evolution of telehealth in terms of maturity from small-scale, point solutions to enterprise offerings that can be used across a range of healthcare settings. The diagram below outlines this maturity model.

My key PHM-related takeaway from three days touring the booths of the leading vendors at HIMSS 2018 was the increasing importance of prediction.

As well as attending the ECR show in Vienna, Signify Research analysts also provided a daily column for the Congress Newspaper - ECR Today.

For the first time at ECR there was a dedicated section of the Expo for AI, the Artificial Intelligence Future Lab, with seven exhibitors and a mini-theatre for presentations. There were also a handful of medical imaging AI companies dotted around the main exhibition halls and most of the major vendors found an angle to add AI to their booths.

Big modality hardware releases and artificial intelligence were centre stage at ECR 2018. For imaging IT though, the latest market developments were less obvious. While some vendors may have been saving new imaging IT products for the glitz of the HIMSS 2018 show in Las Vegas (more of this in our show write-up coming soon), there was a distinct lack of new software platforms on show.

Healthcare IT is becoming increasingly complex. In order to keep up with current and future requirements, Advanced Visualisation vendors are organising themselves into two different categories, each specialising to try and stay ahead of competition. ECR this year offered a glimpse of this growing split; some vendors are focusing on interoperability and integration to become preferred platform vendors, while others are aiming to provide superior image analysis and visualisation software to create the AV tools radiologists would desire and demand. What used to be one complete AV solution from one vendor, may soon become two separate products with companies working together in partnerships to offer a pick and choose selection from the leading AV tools vendors.