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R. Lewis Dark:
Of Radiology, Pathology, GE, Siemens, and Philips
WHY THE SUDDEN INTEREST IN IN VITRO DIAGNOSTICS (IVD) by companies serving radiology? Over the past 12 months, what motivated General Electric to spend $8.13 billion and Siemens AG to spend $7.1 billion to acquire their own large IVD manufacturers?
I suspect the answer is: information. In healthcare, radiology and laboratory
medicine have two things in common. First, each specialty is essential
in helping physicians diagnose disease. Second, each specialty produces large
amounts of information, most of which is useful to retain in the patient’s
permanent medical record.
In recent years, digitization of radiology images and software systems to
capture, to study, to store, and to share this information has become a big
business. Most large hospitals are spending heavily to digitize the output of
the radiology services and GE, Siemens, and Philips are major providers of
these imaging systems.
What other medical service generates large amounts of information that
makes up a major part of every patient’s medical record? It is laboratory
medicine: clinical laboratory and anatomic pathology testing. Furthermore,
as a growing number of genetic and molecular assays gain clinical acceptance,
the amount of lab test data that must be captured, analyzed, and stored
increases exponentially. The increased volume of such data already stresses
the storage capacity of laboratory test data bases.
It is my belief that the world’s largest suppliers of radiology systems and
software share a strategy of providing information systems which combine
the data from radiology and laboratory medicine. As this happens, they control
the huge majority of information that make up the individual patient’s
electronic medical record (EMR).
As a business strategy, this has two complementary strengths. First, it positions
these imaging companies to integrate imaging and in vitro diagnostics as technology
and research reveals new clinical relationships between imaging and laboratory
testing. Second, as the producer of informatics systems that collect, analyze,
store, and share diagnostic data from imaging and lab testing, these companies
position themselves to be major suppliers of informatics solutions to healthcare—
at a time when integration of medical software systems is a major goal of
health systems worldwide.
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