Pro Medicus to invest in automation and other 'ologies' in 2019...

Pro Medicus to invest in automation and other 'ologies' in 2019
By Yolanda Redrup
13 Jan 2019 — 2:48 PM
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Health imaging software company Pro Medicus wants 2019 to be the year it expands beyond radiology, helping doctors who increasingly refer to photos – often just a snap on their iPhone – when diagnosing patients to better manage their records.

The company's flagship Visage software lets radiologists view reports and large image files generated by X-rays and other medical scans on the go from their mobile devices, enabling them to make diagnostic decisions remotely.

Now, one of the company's big goals for 2019 is to expand this service into other fields such as cardiology and ophthalmology, which also involve large amounts of imaging.


Pro Medicus chief executive Sam Hupert says the medical profession is using more and more images. Supplied

Pro Medicus chief executive Sam Hupert said access to images was becoming more important across the entire medical profession.

"In my day when I was a doctor and someone came in with a big gash, you'd have to describe it in words. Now you can just take a photo," he said.

labelled by Select Equities executive director Mark Southwell-Keely as one of the few "genuine success stories" from the small cap technology stocks.

In the past 12 months the company's shares have jumped 43 per cent from $8.56 to $12.22, with the stock trading near its all-time high of $12.63, hit in late September.

The Melbourne-based company estimates it has a 4-5 per cent market share of the radiology imaging market in the US, and it also has operations in Europe and Australia.

In November Pro Medicus signed a seven-year deal with Partners Healthcare in the US, which is the operator of renowned hospital Massachusetts General (ranked fourth out of the top 20 hospitals in the country), for more than $27 million. This was its second top-four hospital, alongside the Mayo Clinic.



The initial contract will see its Visage 7 technology rolled out across Massachusetts General, as well as Brigham Women's Hospital, with scope to expand to the other Partners hospitals at a later date. The deal is only for radiology, with the expansion into other fields not happening until later this year.

Automating radiology
As well as expanding to the other "ologies", Dr Hupert said the Partners implementation and continuing the company's ongoing investment into artificial intelligence and automation were major priorities in 2019.

"We already use AI to automate some programs under the bonnet ... but we think it will become more commonplace.

"Will it replace every radiologist tomorrow? Probably not. But we think in 24-36 months it will be universally adopted and we want to be in that time slot, so we've been working on AI for about 18 months.

"There's a lot of work to be done in order to be ready for when it becomes more commonplace."

Pro Medicus has a range of competitors from major technology companies such as Philips, GE Healthcare and Siemens, to smaller niche players.

But Dr Hupert said the big advantage of its software over competitors' products was the way it approached data management.

As medical imaging technology improves, and even things like iPhone pictures become a greater part of a specialist's patient file, the file sizes have been getting too big for traditional technology to transfer between devices, load and manipulate quickly.

"Radiology went from analogue to film-based to digital in the late '90s, early 2000s, and since then it's stayed in the same realm. You have a large network file, compress it and send it down via a wide area network (WAN) or a local area network (LAN)," he said.

"But the file sizes being produced are getting too big ... so ours is more like a streaming technology, rather than compression technology."