We are a software company located in Vienna, Austria, with a focus on VNA (Vendor Neutral Archiving) and DICOM viewing and reporting.

We were founded in 2007 by a group of experienced PACS engineers, who wanted to do something that was a) based on open standards and b) used Web technology as its basis. From those beginnings, we delivered our first solutions in 2009, and we now have an install base of around 80 customers – mostly in Northern Europe, some in Africa and the Middle East and so on, but we have had most of our success in the Netherlands, Belgium, England, Austria and Finland.

The two core products we have are a VNA and a viewer, both based on standards and which can also be sold as two independent products. We have customers who have both the VNA and the viewer, but we also have customers that just have the VNA and customers that just have the viewer. In terms of who those customers are, they are hospitals: regional ones that share medical imaging amongst each other; national organisations (for instance, two of our main projects are the national medical imaging archive of Finland and the national viewing of images system for Estonia); and at the other end of the spectrum, diagnostic centres and diagnostic laboratories, which are relatively small but will do a lot of works for GPs, say. In England, of course, we are working with Acute Trusts.

In terms of functionality: we are one of the few VNA suppliers to allow clinicians the chance to do full diagnostic work with our viewer. We are one of the few full Web-based diagnostic workstations. Many suppliers out there have a viewer, but it is not equipped for radiology diagnostic work – clinicians can look at the images, but they cannot take a full diagnosis on what they see and usually need special workstations. With our solution, everything can be done through the web.

Away from proprietary

The key to our success is “Open” standards. We aim to be the most compliant VNA and viewer solution in the market, so we can integrate easily with any other supplier and are furthest along supporting various standards in the field. That’s very important for our customers, as they know those standards are being supported and we are continuously up to date with that.

Standards are also incredibly important in the healthcare marketplace.  That’s because so many healthcare organisations want to exchange information amongst each other and if you have your own proprietary way of doing it, it is often very difficult to connect between hospitals and regions.

Last but not least

And, of course, SynApps Solutions is a big factor in our success. It’s our distribution and implementation partner for the United Kingdom – and anything we deploy in England goes via SynApps. We focus on technology development and work with local partners to do all the marketing, sales, support, and use our software for their businesses.

Marcel Swennenhuis is one of the leaders of core tech partner J4Care, an innovative software company that’s helping medical professionals, as well as patients, by enabling easy, safe and fast storage and access to complete medical records

Next time Marcel will be taking a look into emerging customer demand around non-DICOM, for both Medical Photography and Patient Records-type customers