The PACS market has changed over the past few years—but will continue expanding along with the healthcare imaging industry.

“PACS 2017: Reconstructing for the Future” provided information and insight into the minds of thousands of healthcare professionals over 12 months, specifically from large hospitals, community hospitals and imaging centers about their organization’s use of PACS and evaluation of PACS leaders’ products and services.

Though the report gives a comprehensive report of the highest and lowest ranked vendors based on performance, below are some of the main takeaways from the report.

1. Small niche PACS vendors are standing out. Former PACS leaders are struggling to meet expectations. Mergers and acquisitions are creating challenges. And larger organizations are looking for PACS vendors that can meet the expectations of their organizations.
2. Vendor ownership changes are creating uncertainty for some providers. Customers noticed a decrease of service quality, new bugs in the system and an increase in cost after Intelerad was acquired by investment back NOVACAP. Community hospitals mostly reported positive feedback regarding IBM’s acquisition of Merge and reported feeling optimistic that Merge will be able to help meet their enterprise imaging needs in the future. Lastly, McKesson Radiology’s customers now are unsure of how they will be affected by its partnership with Change Healthcare.
3. Sectra, Carestream and INFINITT establish great relationships with customers and continually provide meaningful updates. All three vendors excelled in their overall rankings amongst large hospitals. Customers reported Sectra as being easy to learn and use and great functionality. Respondents also highlighted how well Sectra’s PACS interfaces with other technologies in their hospitals. Carestream was reported as being easy to use and showing significant improvement within customer service and INFINITT was reported as having accessible and responsive representatives and solid and easy to use PACS.
4. GE Healthcare continues to gain market share despite relationship and usability shortcomings of Legacy PACS Solutions. Though GE is one of the poorest PACS performers for large hospitals, they are often considered and chosen by customers due to name recognition for its enterprise imaging solutions. It was reported that about half of GE Healthcare’s PACS customers plan to move away from their product and more than half would not buy their product again.
5. Seimens is rapidly losing customers. KLAS admitted it struggled to find providers using the Siemens PACS and did not come across many newly live customers. Of the ones that did participate in interviews for the report, one-third plan to move away from Siemens’ PACS.
6. INFINITT and McKesson perform well for community hospitals. It was reported that INFINITT has created a PACS that is easy to use and meets and exceeds clients’ needs and expectations around technology. Customers are also pleased with customer service provided by INFINITT. McKesson was reported as having the functionality in their PACS that many providers need. Additionally, providers said they look forward to product updates and that upgrades improve the PACS.