Dear Healthcare IT Insider,
It's not commonly known that commercial telemedicine systems were developed to clinically assess injured people in remote locations to determine if the patients needed to be evacuated to a hospital. Thanks to the financial commitment of Ontario's provincial government and owners of offshore drilling rigs in the North Atlantic, the industry was launched in 1980.
The camera-on-a-stick systems using slow-scan television technology that transmitted freeze-frame images over telephone lines also launched the teleradiology industry. Colorado Video of Boulder, led by founder and inventor Glen Southworth, also produced the first commercial video special effects machine, the first video frame grabber for use with computers, and the first image subtraction system.
So it was intriguing to be contacted by Denver Health Medical Center about a new PACS peripheral that improves the ability of its emergency team to view diagnostic images in real-time of critically injured patients about to be evacuated to its level I trauma center. Twenty-eight years later and 30 miles down the road, the wheel has been reinvented. Read about the new intelligent software that's being used in this edition's Insider Exclusive.
Speaking of software innovations, a decision-support tool for the automatic evaluation of dementia using PET image data is showing impressive results in clinical trials in Australia and Germany. Check out the details by clicking here or by visiting your Healthcare IT Digital Community.
And because our Insider Exclusive focuses on technology that evolved from telemedicine, we'd also like to mention a major telemedicine initiative that's being launched in Pakistan. This will include teleradiology, and perhaps even PACS, so we expect to be reporting about it. Learn who's making this happen -- the coalition is quite an interesting combination.
Corporate acquisitions also have been on the rise recently in our market segment. RIS developer Sunquest Information Systems has inked an agreement to acquire U.K. laboratory software developer Anglia Healthcare Systems; Misys Healthcare Systems has completed a merger with Allscripts; image management firm Emageon agreed to a $62 million buyout from Health Systems Solutions; and Nuance Communications bought speech recognition competitor Philips Speech Recognition Systems.
Enjoy the remaining weeks of autumn, and if you see me at the upcoming RSNA show, please introduce yourself.
