By Marianne Matthews
Jim Morgan, Vice President of Medical Informatics, FUJIFILM Medical Systems USA, Inc.
The newly-created FUJIFILM TeraMedica, Inc is well-poised to meet the demands of a growing pool of healthcare providers seeking vendor neutral archive (VNA) solutions, according to Jim Morgan, vice president of Medical Informatics, FUJIFILM Medical Systems USA, Inc. Morgan sees the next three to five years as a time when VNA technology will continue to evolve and vendors with their finger on the pulse will reap the rewards of a robust market.
“It’s not a matter of if customers are going to buy the technology, it’s a matter of when,” said Morgan. “There’s a very low share of installations that have VNA today. We expect the market is just now getting to the point of accelerating.”
Morgan says the technology is top-of-mind with the chief information officers (CIO’s) at mid-sized hospitals and multi-hospital groups across the country. “It’s in their budget cycle—it may be this year, next year, or two years from now. But they fundamentally believe they need this technology.”
So, how best to prepare for a growing market? Acquire a best-in-class solution. TeraMedica was a pioneer in the VNA market and recently received the “VNA/Image Archive KLAS Category Leader” Award for 2014.
“We felt this technology was strategically important to own because they [TeraMedica] could be acquired by someone else. And since we saw this as something strategically we would want to make as a centerpiece of our overall solution, we felt the time was right to acquire the company.”
The best part about the acquisition, says Morgan, is that there is “zero overlap.” Morgan noted that several recent acquisitions in the market brought with them “a lot of rationalization” and a level of uncertainty about what changes would be made to existing technologies. Not the case, he says, with the FUJIFILM Medical Systems acquisition of TeraMedica, calling the relationship “100% complementary” and noting that there would be no changes to the technical team or the support teams.
There are, however, plans for growth. “We plan to grow the staff because they’re [TeraMedica] a fairly lean organization, and just as we think the market is expanding, we want to be positioned to have enough staff to support that expansion,” said Morgan.
FUJIFILM TeraMedica is the result of a marriage that brings together innovation and stability; a world-class product and a very financially secure company. It all adds up to customer confidence, says Morgan. “Now customers can have confidence that their 10- or 20-year investment will be preserved. They are going to know who is going to provide the technology today, tomorrow, next year, and 10 years from now. It will still be FUJIFILM. There’s no uncertainty related to that technology now.”
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