Fujifilm’s HIMSS Preview – What’s New for 2022?

HIMSS is always one of our biggest and most exciting tradeshows. While meetings like the RSNA and SIIM take a deep dive into the business and intricacies of diagnostic enterprise imaging, HIMSS gives us that birds eye view of our critical role within the full healthcare ecosystem. We stand alongside the big EHR, imaging informatics, and health tech vendors to show how our latest enterprise imaging and IT innovations, along with ongoing provider and partner collaborations, are advancing healthcare as a whole.

So, what can you expect to hear, see, and takeaway from visiting Fujifilm at HIMSS 2022? We sat down with our Senior Vice President of Medical Informatics, Bill Lacy, to get a sneak peek.

1. What are some common needs or pain points you’ve heard from HIMSS attendees in recent years? Are they looking to consolidate vendors, increase study volume, improve data access…?

Across the board, there is a need for a consolidated, centralized imaging record. Healthcare enterprises need to show providers the full patient picture if they want to deliver optimal care; departmental imaging silos no longer fit the bill. We’re seeing that on a global scale, where regions of the world that previously relied on separate imaging systems are looking to adopt one comprehensive enterprise imaging solution.

The PACS of the future is not just for radiology, and we look forward to showcasing that PACS evolution at HIMSS.

2. What does that shift to a centralized imaging solution mean from a storage perspective?

It goes without saying that moving to a single, centralized imaging system will increase storage requirements, which IT must manage. With that, leveraging the cloud is critical, either as an extended storage tier or a fully hosted application. We’re seeing an increasing number of organizations looking to transfer the heavy and costly maintenance burden of compute and storage resources to the server-side,   cloud-hosted environment, and I anticipate the reliance on private vendor and commercial clouds continuing to explode in the next few years. Our Synapse Cloud Services will be another area of focus for us at HIMSS for that exact reason.

3. 2020 and 2021 brought several unique needs from healthcare facilities, particularly related to remote work environments and support for periodic spikes in study volume. Do you anticipate those needs continuing in 2022? Have you added or adjusted any Fujifilm offerings to fit this evolving need that you can discuss during HIMSS?

COVID accelerated trends that had already surfaced in radiology and cardiology. The ability to work from home, automate processes, and leverage physician and patient portals, for example, all shifted from ‘nice to have’ to essential. Interest in remote training programs, like our Synapse Learning Cloud 360 (SLC360), also skyrocketed. Beyond the social distance value, Synapse customers really gravitated toward the flexibility that our remote training program provides. With SLC360, physicians and administrators completed customized PACS training courses wherever and whenever was most suitable for them. The result of that approach has been faster user adoption, shortened project timelines, and more successful product go-lives – all amidst a global pandemic.  So, while we have started to see an eventual return to pre-pandemic work environments, I expect these optional work preferences to continue to be of interest, and that’s something we’re happy to review in more depth during the show.

4. Do you foresee any “supplementary” PACS solutions – such as advanced visualization, digital pathology, AI, or enterprise viewers – receiving increased interest from HIMSS 2022 attendees? Why or why not?

Artificial intelligence (AI), digital pathology, advanced visualization, and the enterprise viewer are all rapidly evolving with new use cases, functionalities, and value-adds coming to light. Specifically, we expect more health systems to put AI into practice in 2022.  It’s no longer just the academic institutions and early adopters that are heavily pursuing the technology. Health systems understand AI’s potential, and how its integration with PACS and EHR applications can be a gamechanger for provider workflow. You can learn more about our 2022 AI predictions from my colleague Nathan Gurgel here.

5. Beyond HIMSS, is there anything else that we can expect to see from Fujifilm in 2022?

2022 will be an exciting year for Fujifilm enterprise imaging. Early this year, we’re taking numerous large health systems live on our latest unified enterprise imaging platform, Synapse 7x. Its server-based architecture presents extensive radiology, cardiology, mammography, and specialty department imaging data through one universal diagnostic PACS viewer, so providers can see that comprehensive patient picture in a holistic and seamless way.

We’re also planning for new AI activity, increased cloud adoption, and a greater footprint in the outpatient setting. Specifically, as we continue to deliver our new outpatient solution to the nation’s largest group practices, we’ll meet their imaging and information system needs in a completely unique way.

To learn more about Fujifilm’s Synapse Enterprise Imaging and schedule an in-person demo at HIMSS 2022, click here.