Q&A on Acuo’s Frost & Sullivan Market Share Leadership Award

Expanding on our initial postof Acuo Technologies (now a part ofPerceptive Software) winning the 2012 North American Frost & Sullivan Award for Market Share Leadership, we interviewed chief operating and strategy officer at Acuo, Shannon Werb, and asked him to give us insight to the win.

Lexmark: What tools and technologies differentiate Acuo’s vendor neutral archives (VNA) solution from its competitors, and thus led to this prestigious award?

Werb: Acuo has prided itself on developing an enterprise solution that is complete on software and light on services. What I’m referring to here is that the software stack from Acuo is very complete; we encompass the technologies our competitors partner to deliver as a complete offering. Some of these technologies include fully Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) certified Cross-Enterprise Document Sharing (XDS) Registry and Repository, Routing/Image Orchestration and pre-fetching – all fully configurable and managed through our implementation and support teams or available to the customer as part of our administrative capabilities. We also encompass an industry-leading data migration solution that we provide both as a technology offering or a complete turnkey service.

Interestingly enough we are now seeing a trend toward VNA enhancement with our technology over other VNA providers at existing customers as well as considerations of full replacement.

Lexmark: In our approach to the technology and the marketplace, how is Acuo’s unique and different from competitors?

Werb: Acuo helped to advance this market in many ways, first through technology innovation but then we followed this by creating a rich partner network for the sales and delivery of our solution. We did this both in the United States and internationally, a trend we are now seeing our competitors follow.

Further to that we have been successful in working with the lead consultants and analysts in the space to provide good coverage for VNA in the market, driving a vision for change and innovation, and finally to demonstrate how the vendors each execute in the market to assist in the decision-making process customers have to go through.

Lexmark: It seems that this award from Frost and Sullivan dovetails nicely with Perceptive Software’s awards from KLAS. As we now go to market together, what does a potential customer (or existing customer) gain by bringing these best-in-class technologies together?

Werb: The technologies together is what we refer to as the content-based medical record, our vision for connecting and making available all unstructured content in context of the patient (healthcare data liquidity) through the medical record, driving better patient care.

Learn more about our vision here and here.

Lexmark: Frost and Sullivan mentioned in its press release that the ‘medical imaging markets in advanced economies are aligning slowly but surely’. What do we think Frost and Sullivan means here and how is this in Acuo and Perceptive Software’s sweet spot … why are we now in the catbird’s seat? On top of that, what must customers do to ensure they are taking advantage of this alignment?

Werb: I interpret this to refer to how the market is really moving to a deconstructed model, that being best-of-breed integration of the best components for the solution. Hardware really came out of the solution years ago as picture archiving and communication system (PACS) vendors allowed customers to buy their own hardware; even today there remains restrictions. In PACS today and going forward, this refers to the separation of software components: VNA (archive) from workflow (worklist) and from the viewer (diagnostic or enterprise). From a pure PACS perspective, you are seeing customers procure these separately in North America, taking ownership of the integration while internationally (Europe, Middle East and Africa specifically) they procure through a PACS vendor requiring separate/best-in-class VNA and radiology information systems (RIS) to be included, not from the same vendor.

Further to this concept is the integration of VNA and enterprise content/document management (ECM/EDM). The market, as well as the analysts, recognize the need for these to combine. For healthcare this drives at the content-based medical record, a complete picture of a patient through availability of all structured and unstructured content delivered in context.

Perceptive is in a unique position as customers look to procure these systems as an integrated offering, leveraging a common repository, to manage all unstructured content (documents and medical imaging) and deliver it in context of the application, user or patient.

Lexmark acquired Acuo Technologies in January of 2013 and its capabilities are now integrated into Lexmark’s Perceptive Software division.  You can read more about Acuo here and read the news release from Frost and Sullivan here. To find out more about VNA, click here.