secureRAD on Monday announced the launch of its new cloud-based service for the easy sharing of medical images. Developed for healthcare facilities, physicians and patients to exchange medical images with the speed and simplicity of email, secureSHARE is secureRAD’s latest offering aimed at expediting the patient-care process.

Standard approaches to the transfer of medical images – burning and mailing CDs, printing film, or faxing reports – are labor-intensive, costly and too slow for emergency situations. By using secureSHARE, providers can quickly and easily access patients’ imaging. Providers can also use secureSHARE to share images with referring physicians or patients, who in turn can share the information securely online.

Few competitors have taken images to the cloud for their clients. Fewer have made it as easy as secureRAD has with secureSHARE, said Phillip Jackson, president of secureRAD. “Competitors have made it more difficult for patients,” Jackson explained. “In some cases, patients won’t have access to images. In others, cumbersome signup requirements confuse the process. secureSHARE makes the experience as easy as setting up a Gmail account.”

secureSHARE is web-based, so it can be accessed on both Apple computers and PCs. Also, secureRAD has partnered with Switzerland-based Pixmeo to allow users to access secureSHARE on their iPad or iPhone via the Osirix HD DICOM Viewer. Imaging on secureSHARE is stored through secureCLOUD, the company’s cloud-based picture archiving and communication system (PACS). secureCLOUD is hosted in secureRAD’s high-security Baltimore data center, allowing providers to deploy hundreds of terabytes of storage at low-cost, compared with the company’s competitors.

To read more about secureSHARE, click here. To contact secureRAD if you’re interested in secureSHARE and want to learn more, please call 800-501-1537 or email sales@securerad.com.

According to an post today from Barb Darrow at GigaOm, new projections from IHS say shipments “cloud servers” — computers used to power public and private cloud computing infrastructure — will soar to 875,000 in 2012, up a whopping 35 percent from 647,000 units shipped last year.

Darrow says these numbers bolster other research showing that the cloud computing juggernaut continues to roll. Recent CB Insights data found that venture capital investment in cloud computing companies accounted for more than a quarter of all Internet-related deals and more than a third of Internet investment dollars last year.

secureRAD is seeing the boom in cloud demand first-hand. We build tools to help enterprise organizations share their medical imaging record. Version 2 of our cloud product, secureCLOUD, will be released later this month. We’ll give you the details soon on what secureRAD’s latest version of secureCLOUD will offer our clients.

Source: IHS

In a Washington Post “Capital Business” perspective piece published yesterday, Angela Petty, senior principal research analyst at research firm Deltek, wrote about a positive outlook for the industry.

“The Defense Department and [Department of Veterans Affairs] are leading efforts to develop electronic health records, give providers and patients access to records through wireless and mobile devices and allow patients to participate in their own care through telemedicine, bringing specialists to rural areas and the battlefield,” Petty wrote.

Petty cited a recent Deltek report, which projected that the federal health care IT market will grow from $4.5 billion in 2011 to $6.5 billion by 2016. She added that the omnibus spending package Congress passed in Dec. 2011 included $100 million for a joint Pentagon and Department of Veterans Affairs initiative to develop a unified electronic health record system.

In the piece, she also offered some interesting “requirements” for companies hoping to take advantage of federal spending.

secureRad builds tools to help enterprise organizations share their medical imaging record. Version 2 of our secureCLOUD product will be released later this month.

We’re constantly striving to stay informed, and continue updating our products to satisfy our customers’ needs. Our products, like securePACS and secureRIS, are value-engineered, leveraging open source software to reduce R&D costs. We’ll give you the details soon on what secureRAD’s latest version of secureCLOUD will offer our clients.

I tried again, later. It was a G4 tower. I still wasn’t sure about it. But, I was making monthly payments on it… so, I kept it and became resigned to the reality that I was going to be a Mac user whether I liked it or not.

Today I work on a Mac, have Apple TV’s, an iPhone, an iPad and my office is littered with Think Different posters from Apple’s advertising campaign. I built my business on Apple as a platform. We oversee hundreds of Apple computers. They help radiologists, doctors and researchers see cancer, diagnose patients, and cure disease. In 2006 Apple saw our potential and supported us as while we found our footing as a young company.

I’ll miss Steve. I’ll miss his intuition to innovate and mostly the insane excitement he had for what he did. He was beyond passionate about everything he did. It was contagious. For me, Steve Jobs will live on as an idol and someone who I will always admire.

His mantra: Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Rest in peace, Steve.

Today we finished testing new infrastructure necessary to provide secureCLOUD outside of the United States!  For those of you who are not familiar with secureCLOUD, it is a hosted platform for storing and sharing medical image data securely. Due to “safe harbor” regulation, healthcare organizations in the European Union are restricted to storing patient data within the EU.  Our new state-of-the-art home outside of London (United Kingdom) can scale exponentially allowing customers in the United Kingdom and the European Union to meet the compliance requirements of their respective countries, while benefiting from a reliable, high-speed, secure hosted PACS solution.

We look forward to offering and supporting secureCLOUD in a new market.

Sincerely,

Phil Jackson | President
secureRAD

A: There are lots!  Here are a few:

1) Doing PACS the right way is expensive! Software licensing and ongoing IT costs associated with PACS storage is expensive.  PACS systems configured with redundancy (not just RAID!) and a web viewer or referring physician portal can cost tens of thousands (if not hundreds) of dollars.  With secureCLOUD you pay a low price per study (not per click), our image storage is redundant and secure, AND all of your medical imaging is available online through an easy-to-use web portal.  Most importantly, there is absolutely ZERO IT overhead.  Assuming you have a network connection to the Internet in your practice, secureRAD can start receiving images tomorrow.

2) Because it works.  Teleradiology providers who provide over-read services, nighthawk services, off-site interpretation, etc. need to easily access their image data from their PACS workstation.  Radiologists don’t want to manage VPN connections to their customer sites, image routing and all of the other pains that come with medical imaging IT.  secureCLOUD is a unified platform for connectivity with your clients, storage and retrieval of medical imaging data, and workflow tools to manage your practice.

3) HIPAA says so. Laws surrounding the retention of medical imaging data vary state by state, however, it’s a safe bet your imaging needs to stick around for the next seven years.  With secureCLOUD your data is stored indefinitely, as long as you maintain an active contract with us.  Because you pay per study (not per click), even if you send zero studies to us in a given month or year your data is still “online.”  Should you choose to terminate your secureCLOUD contract (we’d be very sad) we can provide your data on external hard disk, DVD, etc.

4) Vendor neutrality. There’s a lot of talk about vendor neutrality these days.  Most important is to know your DICOM data exists in a non-proprietary format, somewhere!  All too often we help customers migrate from other platforms to ours and are stuck dealing with proprietary data.  (To be blunt, It stinks!)  All imaging data sent to secureCLOUD is stored in a DICOM 3.0 file format (the standard format for medical imaging data).  Should you suffer data loss or a system failure our engineers can help you get back on your feet, easily, with no pain.

Medical imaging technologies can be complex and is often misunderstood (sometimes, even by the vendors!). It’s our feeling that many of the vendors in this space make purchasing decisions difficult and cumbersome. We’ve seen outrageously priced solutions, solutions that are feature-LESS instead of feature-RICH, and solutions that only play nicely with 2D imaging (X-ray). As all types of medical imaging (CT, MRI, ultrasound and X-ray) play a critical role in clinical decision-making today, we feel the technology should be as capable as the doctor using it. secureRAD delivers an affordable, user friendly imaging platform that harnesses the most reliable and user friendly technologies, available.

We’re excited to share our medical imaging solutions with attendee’s of the AAOE show in 2011, this year. Please don’t hesitate to set up an appointment with us, by clicking here.

Join secureRAD at the Annual AAOE Conference in Orlando, Florida

The American Association of Orthopaedic Executives is an organization dedicated to providing education and resources to orthopaedic practice executives and their staff members. AAOE is the premier orthopaedic practice management association.

secureRAD is a provider of innovative technology solutions and consulting services for the medical imaging community and will be presenting and demonstrating their product range in Orlando, FL.

Make Appointment to meet with secureRAD