Emageon and Vital Images have inked an integration and reseller agreement under which Emageon will resell Vital Images’ Vitrea software as an integrated component within its Enterprise Visual Medical System (EVMS). This strategic partnership allows Emageon to market Vital Images’ Vitrea software to its customer base, representing approximately 600 hospitals nation-wide. Vital Images provides advanced visualization and integrated analysis tools that complement Emageon’s enterprise visualization and workflow system. Additionally, Vital Images will be able to provide its installed base with the ability to integrate their stand-alone software into Emageon’s EVMS, providing customers with access to clinical content management capabilities through the same user interface.

In related news, Emageon announced new product developments including a new quality control tool for Technologists, a radiology content management system, and newly enhanced web-based admin tools. These new developments follow the company’s roll out of its new Enterprise Visual Medical System (EVMS) system release 5.30. The company plans to have these developments on display at this year’s RSNA in Chicago in November. Product details include:

• Technologist QC – is a native quality control tool that runs in the EVMS Advanced Visualization environment. Using the tool, from any secure workstation located inside or outside the enterprise, a user can edit demographics, merge patients or studies, split studies, renumber images, match on Modality Worklist (MWL), and correct images;
• Personal Content Management (PCM) provides an entire user environment that is distributed throughout the enterprise rather than just the images.  Users can subscribe to folders to initiate streaming of studies from selected folders, avoiding problems associated with “push-model” found in many systems.  PCM stores encrypted versions of the retrieved studies locally, improving performance of the remote user’s experience; and
• An enhanced web admin – A comprehensive toolset for PACS Administrators, Radiology IT and Radiology Directors that offers data mining capabilities with reports, configuration tools, audit logs, policy-based deletion settings, and others.

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Eastman Kodak Company reported Health Group Q3 2006 sales of $597 million, down 6 percent. Earnings from operations for the segment were also down at $68 million, compared with $96 million a year ago. The company credits higher silver prices, and also the costs associated with the company’s exploration of strategic alternatives for its Health Group as the cause for the decreased sales and earnings. Through the changes the group has maintained operating margins of 11.4 percent, the company said. Overall Kodak reported GAAP earnings improvement of $877 million for Q3, on sales of $3.204 billion, largely as the result of the recording of a tax valuation charge in the year-ago quarter of $778 million. The company also delivered a $98 million increase in digital earnings, driven by wider gross profit margins, from strong earnings performance in the Graphic Communications and Consumer Digital businesses, and the result of the company’s global cost-reduction initiatives.