Teleradiology is becoming an important part of the practice of radiology. One of the leading for-profit companies is this field is NightHawk Radiology Services, which I have discussed in previous notes. Below is an excerpt from a recent article about a new company initiative (see: NightHawk expanding its dimensions):
NightHawk Radiology Services..., one of the pioneers in using healthcare information technology and time zone differences to help hospitals provide late-shift and weekend radiology coverage, demonstrated two new permutations of the IT platform it uses in its core teleradiology business....The 12-year-old company found its first customer for one of its new business lines in Robert Stroud, the physician president of Advanced Radiology, an 86-physician practice based in Baltimore whose doctors staff six Maryland hospitals. Stroud's group does not use NightHawk radiologists to do reads. Stroud said he went live Nov. 14 with the NightHawk software to assign and schedule reads as well as track and transmit images and reports for his own practice.
"Nighthawk" is a term that has been in use for many years in radiology to refer to the interpretation of radiology images during the nighttime hours. NightHawk Radiology Services adopted this same term for their company with the mission of providing such services to radiology groups. They accomplish this goal in the following way:
NightHawk Radiology Services has developed an innovative approach to the delivery of radiology services by operating centralized, state-of-the-art reading centers in Sydney, Australia and Zurich, Switzerland. Staffing U.S.-trained, board-certified radiologists specializing in emergency radiology, these locations are ideally situated for U.S. care because when it’s the middle of the night in Boston, it’s daytime “Down Under.” When it’s early morning in Los Angeles, it’s daytime in the Alps. From the centralized reading centers, NightHawk radiologists interpret exams and report the results to attending physicians in real-time, usually less than 20 minutes.
The company had an internal need for specialized software to assign, schedule, track, and transmit images and reports, which it then proceeded to develop. We now learn that NightHawk has created a software business by licensing this internally-developed software to radiology groups with similar needs. Comparable scenarios have occurred in the clinical lab industry. Pathology groups have developed LIS software to support their lab outreach businesses which they then commercialized.
This strategy by NightHawk strikes me as very innovative. Some might criticize it on the basis that the software they are licensing is a critical part of their own intellectual property and that they are encouraging competition with their core business, teleradiology, by licensing it to others. However, I suspect that many of the radiology groups in the U.S. have no interest in competing in the nighthawk business but instead will use the software to coordinate their support for the multiple hospitals that they serve. If such groups then seek nighttime coverage, their natural inclination will be to turn to NightHawk for such services because of the seamless software integration that will then be possible.
Dear Mr. Friedman,
We provide LIS solutions in Brazil for almost 20 years. We´ve seen Laboratories offering their LISs to the market and none of them succeeded. So, we don´t believe in Laboratories marketing/supporting/customizing LIS to other Laboratories. The NightHawk solution, though, seems to be viable and desirable, due to the specifity and, at least for the moment, small number of prospects.
Posted by: Pedro Gunther | December 07, 2006 at 11:31 AM