PACS COMPANIES

Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) is a key technology for the management or medical imaging and its associated data. As imaging has moved from hard copy to soft copy and increasing numbers of clinicians wish to access original image data rather simply review the "reads," PACS has become the key tool to tie together the diverse imaging modalities and clinical departments.

PACS is primarily an IT system that solves three problems:

i.)Storage of images and associated text data, usually via the DICOM standard
ii.)Retrieval of such data to both local and remote viewers via networking standards
iii.)Backup of data to comply with legal regulations. PACS provides the management tools to make this safe and secure.

PACS is not a set of protocols as each vendor provides different approaches to these same problems. The emergence of remote radiology and night hawk services that operate across the Internet suggest that IP (internet protocols) and the need for diverse institutions to work more closely together could start the process of imposing a set of articulated protocols and standards on the PACS industry.

The establishment of standards would be a substantial benefit for customers of PACS as such standards would reduce the costs of purchase and ownership, enable easy migration from one system to another, and reduce the costs of specification and purchase as buyers could simply require that vendors met standards rather than spell out for themselves desired components of those standards.

The list below represents the key PACS Companies that develop and sell PACS systems:

Agfa HealthCare
AMICAS, Inc.
Aspyra, Inc.
Acuo Technologies, LLC
American Medical Sales, Inc.
Avreo, Inc.
aycan Medical Systems, LLC
BRIT Systems, Inc.
Carestream Health, Inc.
Candelis, Inc.
Cerner Corporation
CHILI USA, Inc.
CoActiv Medical Business Solutions
Compressus, Inc.
Connect Imaging, Inc.
Data Distributing, LLC
DatCard Systems, Inc.
DeJarnette Research Systems, Inc.
Digisonics, Inc.
Double Black Imaging
DR Systems, Inc.
Emageon, Inc.
EMC Corporation
Empiric Systems, LLC
eRAD, Inc.
Evorad S.A
Graina Medical Solutions
Healthy-IT
IMCO Technologies
Impac Medical Systems, Inc.
Insignia Medical Systems
Intelerad Medical Systems
Integrated Molecular Systems, Inc.
Intuitive Imaging Informatics
INFINITT Co., Ltd.
MacPacs, Inc.
McKesson Corporation
Merge Healthcare
medavis GmbH
Medical Insight A/S
Medicatech USA
Medstrat, Inc.
Medweb
Meta Fusion
MillenSys
NovaRad Corporation
PACSGEAR
Philips Healthcare
Pro Medicus Limited
QStar Technologies, Inc.
RADinfo SYSTEMS
Radlink, Inc.
RamSoft, Inc.
RAYPAX, Inc.
Ray-Tek Services, Inc.
Reliant Medical Services, Inc.
RIS Concepts, Inc.
Rogan-Delft B.V
SMAART Medical Systems, Inc.
Sage Healthcare
ScImage, Inc.
Sectra
TeraRecon, Inc.
Sobha Renaissance Information Technology
Thinking Systems Corporation
Tobin Technical
T2 Technologies
VEPRO AG
VIDAR Systems Corporation
Visage Imaging, Inc.
Visbion Limited
Viztek, Inc.
Voyager Imaging