A couple of weeks ago, it was announced that Ventana Medical Systems, Inc. (a member of the Roche Group) would acquire BioImagene for $100+ Million. BioImagene is a leader in the field of digital pathology and workflow analysis. Earlier this year, we had the opportunity to visit for a few minutes with some members of the BioImagene team including…
Even though the movement of health data is becoming more digitized and shared electronically, one of the main distribution channels for lab results is still the classic faxsimile. The reality for many labs is that this is how most lab results are communicated to referring physicians. Conversations with pathology labs around the country reveal issues with faxing reports,…
We discussed “partnering with your competition” in a post a few months ago and thought it made sense to follow up on the topic after moving further down this path ourselves. We (Pathagility) serve pathology laboratories and their healthcare partners (referring physicians, hospitals, etc.) with our Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform. A lot is going on in this market. As our…
FileMaker Pro is an easy to use, flexible database tool that is quite popular in the pathology laboratory world. Many database applications (laboratory information systems or LIS) for this market have been developed due to cost factors and ease of deployment especially if the lab has limited IT resources. FileMaker Pro will continue to be popular for sometime with smaller volume…
Came across this post and video about how HL7 works on Twitter by @HL7 and really enjoyed the simplicity of it. What’s interesting though is that HL7 doesn’t seem to be simple at all. Please know I’m not saying HL7 isn’t a good thing, because standardization can add to progression. Also, I’m a business guy and need to leave the details to…
There is an abundance of focus and energy around the shift to digitizing healthcare. The government may be the biggest cheerleader and/or bank roller. Last week, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT posted on its Health IT Buzz Blog a new theme of unity in healthcare emphasizing the fact that it is going to be a huge…
Several years ago I worked for a national lab. Our company’s individual AP labs of different sizes and specialties were sprinkled from coast to coast. The network functioned with each lab maintaining a considerable amount of autonomy and labs’ LIS systems ranged from antiquated to new and shiny and from home-brew DOS-based to the latest…
Today almost every pathology lab director has “interfacing” as a line item on their weekly staff meeting agenda. As more referring physicians implement EMR systems and ramp up their meaningful use (MU) of these technologies to grab their piece of the Federal Government’s HITECH incentive dollars, the demand for LIS-to-EMR interfacing increases. Check out a previous post describing the…
Just about every information source these days points to increased demands on the healthcare IT industry. Many are hoping process efficiencies can be realized by further automating healthcare. Others are focused on the government’s influence related to the adoption of EMR systems. Still others are just doing some math… Cited from U.S. Census data: 303 million total Americans 17% are over…
While it seems that most healthcare providers are hoping to get to the stage where health information systems (EMR/EHR, LIS, RIS, etc.) provide more workflow efficiency, extreme data security and flexible partner collaboration, the path to Utopia seems to be different in almost every case. This is due to the fact that each provider is…