@stuartgh » Medical imaging markets

Comparing b2b communities from the medical imaging industry

Stuart Hall — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 14:33:55 +0000

It’s interesting to see the comparative growth of rival online communities in the multi-billion dollar medical imaging industry. Especially in the run up to RSNA 2009, when the use of so-called social media tools like Twitter is much more in evidence than a couple of years ago. This is backed up by analysis through online traffic tools, which shows both Twitter and Facebook among the top referral and destination sites for these radiology communities. Indeed tweets tagged #rsna appear automatically on the RSNA official site, and many companies like Barco now have their own Twitter profiles and custom lists you can follow.

The players in chronological order

The established player is AuntMinnie, originally set up by started by Dr. Phillip Berman, CEO of Lumisys, in 1999 and for a time owned by Eastman Kodak (Kodak having invested in the plethora of social media tools, using Facebook to good effect in reaching out to ‘consumers’ for example). Currently owned by IMV with a popular old style forum, it’s a tried and tested model which is obviously successful with the following key fact:

29604 Registered users have made 223898 posts in 13 forums. There are currently 27278 topics.

Then in 2006 came along MedicExchange backed by Medicsight (which itself IPO’d in 2007 for around £30m).Originally launched with a similar old style forum it’s improved its community offering, and reached out to the wider community with a presence in the three staple social media tools of Twitter, Facebook , and LinkedIn.

Then in 2007 from the medical imaging community itself came the radRounds community, founded by Dr Steven Chan, based on the ning-based software platform.

I was fortunate to link up with Dr Sumer Sethi, a long time radiology blogger, who’s himself written a nice roundup of the social networking sites for radiologists on Medscape blogs (note: you’ll have to register to read this post).

Along with the three I’m focusing on he also draws attention toFilmjacket.com, and more recently the impressive looking Radiolopolis site created by Dr Roland Talanow which launched in early 2009 which is the fourth site I’m going to focus on.

Social networks or communities of practice?

Clearly I’m not alone in realising the potential of social networks as this online presentation slide from Len Starnes at Bayer Schering Pharma makes clear. So as the former content manager at Medicexchange.com where I evangelised about the value of social media for medial imaging professionals, and which is now billed as a “social network for healthcare professionals to exchange knowledge”, what lessons can I glean from these rival developments?

Especially now that I’ve been working in the community management sphere for a couple of years, settting up an award-winning b2b community at the UK chartered accountants ICAEW, and currently in a consultant-type role at SiftGroups? My approach is to score the sites on their effectiveness as online communities, and in reaching connecting with their wider audience using the likes of Twitter and Facebook.

A point before I get started though, that we are really talking about here are really online communities, not social networks. Communities are specific to common interests, while social network sites are more about developing personal communities around the profile and connections of an individual. You can find micro-communities within social networks, such as the radRounds fan page within Facebook, and you can have social networking type directories within communities. Basically communities are about a place where like-minded people gather to share experiences and knowledge. Indeed, within that definition there are four basic different types of online communities set up to meet different needs; these four from medical imaging belong to communities of practice’.

Congratulations to RSNA

Before I get to that task however, now that RSNA (the Radiological Society of North America Scientific Assembly & Annual Meeting) is over as the best point to judge how much the online communities fared in response, it’s worth noting how the organisers of RSNA have embraced the likes of Twitter. Indeed a great case in point for anyone studying the use of online and offline social media at an event.

I wanted to quote Jim Donovan’s events blog ‘Show Insights’ and borrow his picture to explain what I mean:

I follow a lot of medical meetings and tradeshows, but most of them are still figuring out how to use Twitter before and during their events. But RSNA clearly had a plan going into their meeting and they have done an incredible job of engaging their members, attendees, and exhibitors. Since I did not attend the meeting, they have also effectively reached non-attendees too!

What impressed me about their tweets is that they really conveyed a sense of enthusiasm and excitement from the show. They really made you wish you were there.

There were all kinds of fun programs, contests, and communications each day. Here are a few that I observed:

* A “Hide and Tweet” contest where clues were tweeted and the first person to find the “Twitter Team” won a prize. The Twitter Team even wore fun T-shirts further promoting the
* Ongoing contests in which the first person visit a certain booth or location won a gift card.
* Helpful tips on things to see and do at the meeting.
* Updates and program changes were effectively communicated.
* And lot’s of great Twit Pics of attendees having a great time.

Another thing that I liked about this effort is that the promotion was not limited to just the 960+ people who were following RSNA on Twitter. For example:

* RSNA also printed the “five best tweets of the day” in the convention Daily Bulletin.
* They built this huge video wall at the convention which had the twitter feed, important RSNA messages, and some advertising.
* You can view the the
Twitter Feed on their website.

Congratulations to the RSNA TWITTER TEAM on a program well executed!

One way Twittering at RSNA 2009?

A different take on how effective the use of Twitter was at RSNA is provided by Dr Guy Shechter, who analysed the degree to which the social media tool of choice was used for simply broadcasting messages as opposed to engaging people in conversation [underlining added by me]:

“A lexical analysis showed that 141/857 (16%) of the #RSNA09 tweets were re-tweets, indicating that one person thought it worthy to repeat what another person had said. An additional 80/857 (11%) of the #RSNA09 tweets were directed at, or explicitly mentioned, another Twitterer. Using the re-tweets and referential/conversational tweets as a measure of social interaction among conference attendees and vendors, this analysis shows that there was only a moderate amount of Twitter-mediated social interaction at RSNA 2009 (27% of all tweets).”

Apart from noticing that I made the Twitter RSNA rankings myself (though not physically present) was struck me about this analysis is that it’s not unexpected. For one thing most people will be readers of tweets, rather than re-tweeters. Secondly, it takes time and effort to understand how to use Twitter for conversation and get RPI from that, as opposed to using it as a new broadcast platform.

It would certainly be interesting to hear from the likes of Carestream Health who feature in the analysis as to what their RSNA social media metrics, both qualitative and quantative, told them about the effectiveness of their campaign over the period.

It would also be useful to see how the medical imaging communities such as AuntMinnie found from their referral stats the extent to which Twitter delivered visitors to their site, which for them is no doubt the aim rather than engaging in conversation?

Xyggy Patent is live

Stuart Hall — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 11:14:14 +0000

News from Xyggy – their patent search service is now live. Forget keywords, this is about item searches.

Strikes me this would be of interest in the medical imaging world. So I tried ‘MRI’ as the item search. Then selected the top of the list return. Usefully the search engine then delivers a list of similar patents, as Xyggy’s Dinesh Vadhia explains:

Imagine you want to find similar patents for a given patent. Now you can with Xyggy Patent. What’s more, you can query with multiple patents (selected by patent number or title) and Xyggy will find all similar patents in ranked order. Go ahead and try it (and its free).

Patent Baristas wrote about Xyggy here and the IPKat said this.

Medicsight PLC Restructures Management Team

Stuart Hall — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 22:46:13 +0000

News from my former workplace: Medicsight/Medicexchange/MGT. Allan Rowley steps up as CEO of Medicsight. Plus from Aunt Minnie news of MGT’s re-scheduling around its next shareholder meeting. As I said when I worked for the MGT guys, it’s really just about managing complexity so reckon they’ll get it sorted pretty soon. Varian Medical Systems Has Received CE Mark for Proton Therapy System btw.

NEW YORK, Feb. 19 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Medicsight PLC, a subsidiary of MGT Capital Investments, Inc. (NYSE-A: MGT) and an industry leader in the development of Computer-Aided Detection (CAD) and image analysis software, which assists radiologists in the early detection of disease, today announces the following restructuring of its management team effective March 19, 2009.

Allan Rowley, currently Chief Financial Officer, becomes Chief Executive Officer; David Sumner, currently Chief Executive Officer, becomes Executive Chairman; and Tim Paterson-Brown becomes a non-executive Director of Medicsight. Mr. Paterson-Brown will remain as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of MGT Capital Investments.

As Chief Executive, Allan will drive forward a revised plan focused on increasing revenues from existing products and streamlining all areas of the business. This will be an ongoing process throughout the year. Allan also takes charge of the financial and operational performance of the Company.

Allan has been CFO of Medicsight since 2006. Previously he worked for ComMedica Limited, a medical software company specialising in Picture Archiving & Communication System (“PACS”) software. Before joining ComMedica, Allan was revenue controller and the director of European Finance at Bea Systems, a NASDAQ-listed software company. Allan has several years of experience in public accounting in the United Kingdom and United States with Arthur Andersen and Ernst & Young, respectively.

Allan will be supported by Troy Robinson who has been promoted to Chief Financial Officer, although this is not initially a Board position. Troy joined Medicsight in February 2007 as Group Financial Controller. Prior to this he was the Finance Manager for IVAX Pharmaceuticals and HP Foods. Troy is an associate of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants.

As Executive Chairman, David Sumner will determine the overall strategy of the Company and will ensure that this strategy is agreed and effectively implemented. In addition, David will lead the promotion of best practice and the highest standards of corporate governance.

Mr. Sumner commented: “We see 2009 as a pivotal year for the Company with the expected U.S. and Japanese regulatory approvals around the corner. Medicsight, with its strong year end cash position of 18 million pounds Sterling is in an excellent position to grow robust future revenues from these two strategic territories that already use CT Colonography routinely in the detection and management of colorectal cancer. The structural changes to our management team will enable me personally to focus on international developments and strategic partner discussions as part of our global drive for excellence and improvement of shareholder value. Allan’s focus is to continue to help increase revenues, embark on streamlining the Company, and maximizing all efforts at this critical stage of the Medicsight’s development. We look forward to him working in this new capacity.”

Mr. Paterson-Brown commented, “I look forward to taking on my new role as a non-executive director of Medicsight, as this will allow me to dedicate more time to MGT Capital. The current economic market has recently opened up several opportunities in the healthcare technology space. In order to take their businesses to the next level, many healthcare IT companies with exciting new technologies are looking for the type of investment and management experience MGT offers.”

Medicexchange alumni

Stuart Hall — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 10:57:54 +0000

There’s been a few changes at Medicexchange from the days of 2007 when I happily typed out articles on combining gaming and medical imaging technology to save lives. CEO Adam Boyse and OD Eugene Nicholson have left for bigger and better things, with Adam now CEO at Webopius; and my former content buddy Camila Artoni tells me she’s now living in the US of A. Calan’s still working hard on My Life of Travel too, which is cool.

RSNA launches on Facebook

Stuart Hall — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 12:46:12 +0000

Great to see RSNA, the Radiological Society of North America, on Facebook.

Not suprising to see Dr. Steve Chan congratulating them on the site, with both the radRounds social networking site and its linked presence on Facebook.

Also nice to see that Medicexchange has adopted a useful tag cloud search facility on its home page which allows you to easily search the top 100 keywords across radiology news.

Be interesting to see if radiology portal AuntMinnie responds to this web 2.0 trend.

Blogs and corporate communications

Stuart Hall — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 13:43:27 +0000

Great example of how blogs can effect corporate reputation of GE within the US$100bn medical imaging market from US radiologist blogger Doctor Dalai. I was aware of this story when it happend, and was in communication with both parties, so it’s been very instructive for me too.

The Story According To GE

Our local GE rep and an applications specialist came to visit today. They ran me through a demo of the GE AW 4.4 Volume Share, especially as it will be used with our nascient Coronary CT arteriography (CCTA) program. While 4.4 retains some of the quirks of the earlier versions, it does show some very significant improvements, with some very nice implementations of automation. The images presented were spectacular, having come from a GE VCT 64 slice scanner. They did process a scan from another company’s scanner, and the vascular detection center-line placement didn’t go quite as smoothly, but it was relatively easy to tweak it into complacency.

At the moment, there is a limited remote control option. This allows three limited simultaneous access sessions, and one “virtual AW” session, which gives full control of the AW, but only if no one is using the workstation itself. Late this year, there may be a TeraRecon-style client-server product, but there are no details as yet.

The conversation turned to the Hawkeye, the SPECT/(limited)CT device. The nuclear rep wasn’t along for the ride today, but he did want me to know that diagnostic CT images from our 64-slice VCT could be grafted onto a Hawkeye study. Which sort of defeats the usefulness having a CT in your SPECT camera beyond attenuation-correction only. I related our pending purchase of the Symbia, but I did reassure them that when GE comes out with a diagnostic CT version, we would certainly consider it.

At this point, our rep began a rather surprising discussion, the GE side of my little unpleasantness from four months ago. It seems that there had been considerable internal pressure to get to the bottom of the episode, and it turns out to be rather more complicated than I would have thought. This was probably a rather difficult conversation for our rep, and I am very impressed with him for coming forward, and I am grateful to finally hear something from GE on the topic.

The problem originated with my post comparing the 2D/3D GE Discovery PET/CT with BGO crystals to the 3D Siemens Biograph 16 with LSO crystals. Frankly, it was one of my most carefully written and researched pieces, and I was quite proud of it. I evaluated the various technologies, both of which I actually use daily, and came to the following conclusions:

I’ll give you the punchline first, and then we’ll go into the boring discussion of what’s behind it. My educated, although still subjective, opinion is that the Biograph produces better images. Sorry, GE, but Siemens gives us images with less noise which are overall more pleasing and easier to read, again, in my opinion. . .

. . .What I do know is that the images from the Biograph are better, at least to me, than those from the Discovery. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it. . .

You might ask, “Will the Discovery fail to demonstrate something that the Biograph would show?” Now that’s one question I can’t honestly answer, and it’s probably the most important of all. Time will tell on that one. But you can bet it will become obvious eventually.

Apparently, a competitor (which one is obvious) used this material in sales, which is their privilege, and I can’t say that bothers me particularly. Assuming that I was quoted correctly, and from what I’ve heard, they either handed out copies, or gave out my URL. I would certainly like to hear from any of you who received this material.

But somehow, word got back to GE that I had declared the Discovery’s images “non-diagnostic”. That is simply not true. The quote above is a direct clip from the offending post, which is now off-line. Nowhere do I say that GE’s scanner is non-diagnostic, and if I felt that way, I wouldn’t, I couldn’t, read from their machine. The patients come first, you know.

Supposedly, when someone like me “declares” that a machine is non-diagnostic, the manufacturer must file dozens of papers with the FDA to show that the claim is false. So, our rep went to the clinic that owns the Discovery to see what was the matter. The techs told him that there was no problem (and I remember them asking me why he would think there was), but in the process, this whole situation was mentioned to others. Supposedly, that is all that happened. You all know the rest of the story as it progressed from there.

Our rep had heard about the discomfort this had caused me and expressed sincere regret. Apology accepted, and I’m happy to let bygones be bygones. What was told to me when I was called on the carpet for my blog-posts placed more blame on GE than they deserve, based on today’s disclosure.

As I said at the time, this whole episode demonstrates the desperate need for better communication. Had GE approached me immediately, we could have put the whole problem to rest then and there. As it stands, everyone involved had an unnecessary trip through the ringer. The AuntMinnie.com thread spawned by these unfortunate events disclosed a huge current of anti-GE sentiment, which I found quite surprising and very, very sad.

Let’s all take this lesson to heart and proceed forward. In this day and age, it is critical for vendors to hear what their customers have to say. Maybe today’s sale will be lost, but tomorrow’s might be saved. And, let’s all do a better job of listening to each other. I am very approachable, and I would like to think reasonable as well. Talk to me. Don’t wait until a situation blows up in our faces to say what should have been said.

Medicsight buy

Stuart Hall — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 15:11:00 +0000

“The medical imaging software specialist Medicsight has received approval from the Chinese State Food and Drug Administration (SFDA) for its MedicRead Colon workstation.” (10 Apr, Investors Chronicle)

Leading to IC recommendation:

“Shares in Medicsight have slipped since we advised buying (70.5p, 7 March 2008) the turn of the year. But, with success pegged to the group securing approvals ["The forthcoming year will be extremely important for Medicsight with the expected clearance from the US Food & Drug Administration (FDA) and the Japanese Ministry of Health Labour and Welfare (MHLW), which will unlock significant revenue,' said chief executive David Sumner"], recovery should be on the cards and, at 59p, the shares remain a buy.”

Hmm, sounds interesting. See CEO David Sumner explain more on TV in an interview at CNBC on 18 February following the Toshiba partnership. A few points copied from IC, with addition from me in red:

BULL POINTS

Operating in world’s largest health markets

Added market intel from sister company Medicexchange

Expanding list of partnerships, eg Visage Imaging

Approvals for Japan and US entry due

Global increase in CT imaging and regulatory impetus

BEAR POINTS

Future growth dependent on regulatory approvals

Loss making

Doctor Dalai’s superb April Fool

Stuart Hall — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 09:32:00 +0000

I loved Doctor Dalai’s recent April Fool, announcing the partnership between Siemens and Disney:

“Disney and Siemens are two of the world’s most recognized and respected brands, both known for their relentless commitment to innovation. We look forward to working with Disney to grow our relationship and realize the potential of two great companies. This new relationship creates an ideal opportunity to demonstrate Siemens’ innovations to our customers, while also strengthening the Siemens brand in a memorable and relevant way. Viewing medical images, such as CAT (Computed Axial Tomography) scans or MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) exams has been limited by our 20th Century-based technology.

“No matter how fast the computers get, or how sharp the image may appear, we are still seeing only a shadow of what is truly present within the body,” notes George Nolen, President & CEO, Siemens Corporation. “With the advanced visualization techniques of Disney’s Pixar division, as well as their expertise in flight simulation as applied to various attractions, we are now able to actually place the physician virtually within the body. The most microscopic of processes will be visible to the eye from this vantage point. This certainly represents a new era in imaging.” Note Doctor Dalai, after contact from Siemens, has now removed the post.

The great added bonus about this joke is that there’s a nice grain of truth embedded in it — as didn’t Pixar start out in part as a manufacturer of medical imaging equipment?

Radiology search engine

Stuart Hall — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 22:22:05 +0000

One from David Rothman back in January 2007, updated with help from Steven Chan at radRounds, to say it’s now on a Ning-based med imaging search engine. Note, it’s currently by invitation only too:

“Yottalook is a free radiology-centric search engine based on Google’s indexing technology with proprietary relevance algorithm by iVirtuoso. Currently, Yottalook Images and Yottalook References search engines are available for use. Yottalook Image has specially been designed to search radiology images from various peer-reviewed online sources and currently has access to over 100,000 images. Yottalook References has been designed to search online radiology sources only. Try various refinement options to narrow your search requests even further.”

Now PACS by Microsoft

Stuart Hall — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 23:03:00 +0000

According to the website- The Microsoft Amalga family of Enterprise Health Systems is built on Microsoft technology, offering a comprehensive range of solutions to meet the needs of health enterprise.

Amalga is a “Unified Intelligence System” for healthcare organisations that includes a HIS (Hospital Information System) “built around an Electronic Medical Record (EMR) that includes complete patient and bed management, laboratory, Medication Management, Radiology Information System/Picture Archiving and Communication System (RIS/PACS), pathology, financial accounting, materials management, and human resource systems. Sounds Interesting…

Hat Tip- Dr Dalai’s Blog & Sumer Sethi’s