McKesson Buys Imaging Reference Site

HDM Breaking News, May 15, 2008

San Francisco-based McKesson Corp. has acquired Vivalog LLC, a vendor of medical imaging reference and data management services for radiologists and clinical researchers. Acquisition terms were not disclosed.

Created in 2001 via a grant from the National Institutes of Health, Seattle-based Vivalog operates MyPACS.net, a Web-based repository used to deposit and review medical imaging reference cases. Users contribute reference cases depicting thousands of diseases, now totaling 18,000 cases.

A radiologist who suspects a brain mass may be glioma, a particularly aggressive tumor, can type that word into the search engine and compare the shape and form of glioma images in reference cases with the images of the radiologist’s patient, says Joe Biegel vice president of product management at McKesson’s medical imaging group. The site also can assist in educating medical students, he adds. A physician on rounds with residents, for instance, can show the residents images of a patient contrasted with reference case images from the site.

A similar product, MyPACS Enterprise, enables hospitals and other organizations to make their own proprietary reference sites. Vivalog also sells BioSCRIBE, which includes tools to enable clinicians and researchers to manage data and images for research and clinical trials.

More information is available at vivalog.com.

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