Enterprise imaging software developer Intelerad Medical Systems is investing in the future of cloud computing in radiology with the acquisition of Radius, a provider of cloud hosting and managed services.
Intelerad announced on August 5 that it had acquired Radius, a privately held company based in the Nashville, TN, metropolitan area. The deal expands on a partnership between Intelerad and Radius that began five years ago, with Radius providing cloud services to Intelerad customers.
Cloud technology has been held up as a promising area for medical image management for the past decade. With images stored in a cloud -- either public or private -- facilities could free themselves from having to maintain their own hardware and software, with all the capital equipment and staff costs that that entails.
But that promise has been slow to materialize -- until recently. For a variety of reasons, healthcare has begun to warm up to cloud-based data management, according to Paul Lepage, CEO of Intelerad. Customers are looking for business models that give them flexibility and allow them to scale up over time, he said. Sites are also looking to avoid the large, fixed capital equipment costs that would be required to buy their own archiving hardware.
"This [acquisition] allows us to offer [cloud] solutions and allow our customers to migrate and have the benefits of migrating from on-premise archiving to private cloud and then public cloud over time," Lepage told AuntMinnie.com.
While most of Intelerad's installed base operates under the traditional model of running the company's software on equipment they have purchased and maintain onsite, about 12%-15% of the company's customers have opted for the Radius cloud-based platform and a managed services arrangement that typically involves paying for image management on a pay-per-study model. Several more Intelerad customers will be added to the platform in the fourth quarter, Lepage said.
Radius was launched in 2009 and was originally known as eRadiology until it rebranded as Radius. The company offers its services under a fixed, fee-per-study pricing model that helps customers stabilize costs and increase revenue while eliminating hardware maintenance fees. Radius maintains tier three data centers in Nashville and Atlanta.
Acquiring Radius should help Intelerad meet the needs of radiology customers that are looking to the cloud to solve a variety of problems, from reducing total cost of ownership of PACS to creating a path to artificial intelligence to enabling radiologists to work from remote locations more easily in an era of COVID-19, according to Rick Rubin, Intelerad's chief engineering officer.
"If you are in your own data center with no connection to the public cloud, it makes it a lot harder," Rubin said.
