Acuo Technologies, Client Outlook and GNAX Health form new strategic alliance

GNAX Health, Acuo Technologies and Client Outlook, announced today the formation of a new strategic alliance to provide an integrated and simplified solution for medical image access, exchange and management.    

The cloud-based, clinical content management solution delivered through this alliance offers healthcare providers a cost effective way to deploy a best-of-breed solution that includes a vendor neutral archive (VNA) platform, an integrated universal medical image viewer and image exchange strategies that fit the needs of healthcare organizations.

The solution, available through a single contract, combines Acuo's Universal Clinical Platform (UCP) with Client Outlook's eUnity^TM clinical image visualization, sharing and collaboration toolset, hosted within GNAX's healthcare-focused cloud infrastructure and tier-4 data centers - all supported by a cohesive customer support program. This collective offering provides necessary components critical to building a highly secure disaster recovery and business continuity solution for medical imaging without the infrastructure and costs associated with a traditional model. This solution also provides an economical way to store and protect data by freeing up primary local storage, reducing the total amount of storage needed and shifting from a capital intensive local archive to a pay-as-you-go operational service.

GNAX Health is also in the final stages of developing a web-based image exchange service, called SDEX^TM (Secure DICOM Exchange). Integrated into the foundation of Acuo's UCP and data structure as well with the Client Outlook viewer, SDEX provides customers with the benefits of a single, best-of-breed exchange solution. It meets the challenge of complicated workflows by integrating with the provider's employee and patient identification systems to secure access and simplify patient searches. Studies are retrieved from any of the connected PACS, local edge devices or from the cloud archive, making the location of the image transparent to the end user. Providers are able to securely exchange and view images with other GNAX VNA and non-GNAX customers seamlessly, creating a health information exchange (HIE) platform with a workflow for medical imaging.

Acuo's UCP simplifies the process of managing clinical content, providing virtualization and normalization of medical images and non-DICOM data, service orchestration, data replication, clinical workflow, compliance and contextual data management services, with a built-in performance management environment and dashboard.

Client Outlook's eUnity product provides a universal viewer that lets health care professionals access, manipulate and collaborate in real-time with diagnostic quality medical images using a web-browser and a mobile application for tablets that enables "on-the-go" viewing of all image modalities, including X-ray, CT, MRI, color ultrasound and X-Ray angiography.

"The integration of these solutions solves a wide range of problems for our healthcare customers," said Jeff Hinkle, chief executive officer for GNAX Health. "This offering tightly integrates world-class clinical content viewing, abstraction and life cycle management applications, data migration, cloud-computing and customer support services into a single bundle, greatly simplifying the process of administering enterprise medical image access, exchange and management while reducing IT costs."

All healthcare systems, including hospital networks, university hospitals, community hospitals, physician offices, and other organizations with complex use-case requirements stand to benefit greatly from the interoperability and economies of scale offered by this alliance. The ability to accelerate access to patient information at the point of care along with the collaborative benefits of having an integrated viewing platform improves clinical decision-making, enhances quality of care and speeds up treatment for patients.

Today, healthcare providers and the IT groups that support them face complexities and delays associated with managing multiple sets of clinical data. Departmental image data silos provide integration barriers and make it difficult to be responsive to patient demand, meaningful use requirements and audit demands. Scalability is an ongoing issue as the number and size of medical image files continues to grow at an exponential rate. Ultimately, these problems lead to difficulty in physicians accessing information and collaborating at the point of care.

This offering simplifies and resolves these issues, giving healthcare institutions a shared services approached provided by a trusted partner focused on solving these problems in an integrated and cohesive way. "The money organizations can save by easing the process of moving, accessing and managing clinical data with this new approach," said Brenda Rankin, executive vice president and co-founder of Client Outlook, "will allow them to put more money toward clinical quality improvements."

"This consortium brings an innovative solution based on IHE standards to the marketplace that will disrupt the status quo in healthcare IT," noted Jeff Timbrook, chief executive officer for Acuo Technologies. "We've worked closely with GNAX and Client Outlook to develop an implementation approach that will save our customers significant time and effort. Healthcare organizations can get a complete solution through a single source while lowering their IT expenses with our unique pricing model."

Source: GNAX Health