Adoption of cloud technology in healthcare has been an uphill battle so far, with privacy, “data ownership” and recent investment in on-premise data centres top of U.S. healthcare provider concerns. Imaging informatics has been behind the adoption curve for cloud, given the complex and critical importance of imaging within the care continuum. However, in the last 18 months, focus on cloud adoption in imaging informatics has notably increased, exacerbated further by the impact of COVID-19.
News accounts of two acquisitions in the last month, Intelerad’s acquisition of Radius and Change Healthcare’s acquisition of Nucleus.io, are both underpinned by a strategic shift to capitalise on this trend. Below, we summarise the deals, provide our view on their market impact and discuss if cloud adoption in imaging informatics has finally reached the tipping point for more mainstream adoption.
Intelerad acquires Radius
• Intelerad announced its acquisition of Radius, a Nashville, Tennessee-based private cloud provider, for an undisclosed sum on August 5th, 2020.
• Radius offers both public and private cloud-hosting and enterprise storage with specialist focus and in-house experience in the imaging informatics sector, with 18 employees and two data centre sites.
• The firms have already partnered on 15 customer deployments in the U.S.
• This is Intelerad’s second acquisition, following purchase of work list vendor Clario Medical in November 2018. Intelerad was acquired by Hg Capital in January 2020.
The Signify View: We have three main takeaways from the Intelerad Radius deal:
1) Health provider focus is turning toward cloud, but a variety of deployment models from imaging IT vendors will be required to capitalise on this shift, especially in the outpatient and small community hospital customer segment.
2) Large public cloud offerings from leading cloud providers such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google currently have limitations, namely accessibility, price or technical integration nuances for imaging IT applications.
3) Intelerad is looking to leverage its recent investment and growing brand to offer products with more “elasticity” to suit client need; especially targeting traditional incumbent solutions from larger competitors slower to react to changing user demands.
Intelerad’s move to bring Radius in-house, given that the firms were already partners on some deals, shows increasing premium being placed on cloud technology expertise and assets in the market moving forward.
