Limited hours at AHRA upset PACS companies

Limited hours at AHRA upset PACS companies

Interest in PACS technology was high at last month's American Healthcare Radiology Administrators meeting in Minneapolis, but you had to move quickly to cover the entire show, due to the limited hours of the technical exhibition. The exhibit was open only 11 hours during the four-day span of the meeting, a schedule that upset many vendors.

On the technology side, over two dozen PACS vendors showed their products and services. Partnerships were heavily promoted: Cemax-Icon and OEM partner Picker International actively pitched the Cemax-Icon product line, while Data General touted its agreement with MarkCare.

Shared Medical Systems pushed its Integrated Multimedia Solutions PACS product line, while Imnet Systems, Dynamic Healthcare Technologies, and others showed the integrated PACS/information systems concept as well. Conspicuously absent were PACS firms Eastman Kodak, EMED, CompuRad, and Olicon, although some of these vendors provided financial support. GE and Siemens chose to exhibit with low profiles.

Among interesting new developments were Canon/AOP Medical's announcement that their compact 100-sheet charge-coupled device film scanner is now deliverable, and that they are targeting a launch date of January 1998 for their digital radiography detector. In addition, Articulate Systems/MRC Group showed an integrated network-based dictation/voice recognition system.