Management buyout turns Rogan U.S. subsidiary into Imco

Management buyout turns Rogan U.S. subsidiary into Imco

Firm seeks to broaden reach in PACS and image management

Reflecting a growing trend in PACS to add workflow and information systems software to core image archiving and viewing products, a management buyout has transformed Rogan Medical Systems Inc., the U.S. subsidiary of Rogan Medical Systems B.V., into Imco (Image Management Company) Technologies. Under the direction of president and CEO Mark Schwartz, who previously headed up Rogan’s U.S. subsidiary, Pewaukee, WI-based Imco will focus primarily on the American market, while Rogan will continue to concentrate its efforts in Europe.

The two companies plan to maintain a cooperative but independent relationship, with Rogan serving as a strategic supplier to Imco and Imco as a nonexclusive distributor for Rogan. Products developed internally by either company will be made available to the other via licensing arrangements, while future collaborations on new products and technologies will be negotiated. Imco is not prohibited from selling outside the U.S. and has made sales in Canada and Australia, but for now plans to focus the bulk of its resources in the U.S.

As part of its new identity, Imco is looking to expand beyond PACS into workflow management and related products and services. Initially, this strategy includes developing relationships with third-party suppliers in computed radiography and digital radiography and developing new products, both in-house and via third-party vendors. In fact, this was the impetus for Imco’s interest in becoming an independent company, according to Schwartz.

“The desire for management to buy out the company was driven by U.S. management,” he said. “We wanted to be able to concentrate on the U.S. market and bring a broader spectrum of services to our U.S. customers.”

Rogan’s U.S. operations were originally established as an affiliate that was not owned directly by Rogan but by several owners of Rogan. Rogan B.V. was founded in 1987 as a provider of PACS and teleradiology products. The company is perhaps best known for HyperPACS, an open-architecture, Windows NT-based workstation for diagnostic review of radiology images.

Other products in the HyperPACS family include a variety of archiving and display systems, such as HyperView, a software extension of HyperPACS that preloads images to the network to provide radiologists with nearly real-time access to images; HyperPACS Pro, another software extension that allows the user to determine image-display formats; HyperScan, a film digitizer; HyperArchive, a radiology image archiving and image-management product; and HyperNet, a networking product optimized for the transfer of radiology images between both local and remote locations. The most recent addition to the Rogan Medical family is a DVD-R jukebox-based PACS archive, a 4.7-megabyte DVD-R archive that can store seven times more data than its predecessor, the CD-R.

Imco, which claims more than 40 installed image management systems in the U.S., now hopes to leverage this core product portfolio with broader integrated image and information management capabilities developed both internally and through third-party relationships. The company is already in discussions with several potential partners in the information systems and workflow sectors for both product distribution and development.

“We want to be able to better anticipate what the user is going to want or need and then automate the process to anticipate what task will come next,” he said.

Although the company is interested in partnering with other vendors that carry recognized names in the marketplace, Imco does not want to relinquish its independence again.

“There is a desire among customers to deal with a recognized name, (but) larger companies move more slowly in bringing new products to market,” Schwartz said. “So we are really looking to form relationships that allow us to remain agile and competitive.”

© 2000 Miller Freeman, Inc., a United News & Media company.

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