For PACS customers who wonder what happens when the Sectra-Philips distribution contract ends September 2007.
How has Sectra done since July 6, 2005 when Philips acquired another PACS vendor?
Since the change in relationship with Philips, Sectra has increased its sales and delivery capacity in countries where Philips was an important sales channel. In other countries, where Philips never was an important factor, Sectra has continued to do well on its own. The revenue reported by Sectra medical systems has increased from SEK 392.1 M in 2004-2005 to SEK 610.9 M in 2006-2007. In its 29-year history, Sectra has always been operationally profitable – we still are and we intend to remain so.
Revenues Sectra Medical Systems. Bars show quarterly sales and the line shows rolling 12 months revenues each quarter.
Why have many customers chosen to turn to Sectra for support?
Sectra has taken on direct service responsibilities for many previous Philips PACS customers. Examples include Willis-Knighton, Midstate Medical Center, John Muir and Cox Health in the US and many others in the rest of the world. As of May 2007, for every US customer who has elected to change to the new Philips product, twice as many have chosen to continue with their Sectra PACS and instead switch support to Sectra. Sectra’s proactive and cost-effective approach to service and support has proven to be a leading differentiator and of significant value to our growing customer base.
Sectra has also started to sell add-ons to existing Sectra PACS customers, such as mammography workstations and orthopaedic solutions. Many customers have found the value proposition of Sectra over Philips highly appealing both in services provided and cost of products. Sectra is focused on listening to our customer base and designing flexible solutions that grow with them and their needs. By dealing directly with the manufacturer of the product, customers are receiving a highly responsive level of account relationship management and support.
How long will the change in relationship with Philips continue to impact Sectra?
The phasing-out of our cooperation with Philips has been under way since 2005 and it will continue during the 2007/2008 fiscal year. While the change in relationship with Philips will certainly continue to have an impact on Sectra for some time, we remain the largest independent PACS vendor with a long track record of profitable innovation. Our more than 18 years as a leader in the PACS industry is driven by our commitment to solve our customers' business- and workflow challenges with effective medical IT solutions.
Does this mean that all Philips related business will cease now?
In many cases we have multi-year binding contracts with customers through Philips. These include the London LSP deal, a national program for PACS in the UK in which Sectra provides the software as a subcontractor to Philips. In several other installations Sectra has long-term service and support contracts with customers through Philips. Sectra will honor all service through Philips since we believe end-user customers should not suffer based on this decision.
I am a Philips customer who bought a Sectra PACS. Will I be forced to move to Stentor now?
No, Philips has, by contractual commitments, access to all upgrades and new releases for three additional years from Sectra, until September 2010. Furthermore, Sectra has elected to guarantee to continue this relationship also after these three more years by offering existing Philips customers new releases and additional licenses as long as such customers have valid support contracts.
This is valid both for new releases, including the entirely new software platform currently in development, which is optimized for the extremely large datasets of future radiology (we have successfully loaded and worked with 20,000+ images per exam in this new platform without delays for the user), and additional sales, for example in expansions and add-ons to existing systems.
Accordingly, the investments made by all Sectra customers are safe, whether electing to continue on with Philips or choosing to go directly to Sectra for service. That said, customers are encouraged to evaluate their options by discussing the current level of service and support they are receiving from Philips vs. the service, support and product offering available directly from Sectra.
We will make the latest system enhancements and improvements available to all end users, even if Philips chooses to make them difficult or expensive to implement. Just fill in your contact details in the information request form and give us an opportunity to discuss your needs.
Will all Sectra new features be available also through the Philips channel?
No, Philips never sold all Sectra PACS features since they had in-house development and some other partners producing some competing components. For instance, cardiology enhancements that are commonly sold with Sectra installations around the world were rarely available through Philips. Philips offered some Broker and Web Browser products formerly produced by Mitra and others. Furthermore, we offer a range of Clinical Solutions Network enhancements that provide enhanced functionality. We continue to innovate and deliver industry leading product and service enhancements, which are available directly from Sectra. Contact us to discuss your requirements by filling in the information request form.
We are not happy with the service and support offerings from Philips. What can we do?
Sectra does, in parallel to Philips, offer direct service and support to our worldwide installed base. In recent years, we have been working hard with tools for remote support and system surveillance of a type so far unheard of in the PACS industry. Our goal is to ensure that you can continue to use your current PACS, but with better and more cost-effective service and support. Call us for a discussion and join other successful customers who have chosen to change their support directly to Sectra.
How does Sectra support the important new standard XDS (Cross Document Sharing) and its sub-specialty XDS-I for images?
Sectra’s view is that XDS-I is the most important new standard in imaging in many years. It is interesting to note that the basic metaphor of XDS is identical to the storage structure used within Sectra PACS since 1998, with a central registry and distributed physical storage. In addition, Sectra has implemented in southern Sweden and in the Stockholm area of Sweden (comprising the majority of Stockholm hospitals including the Karolinska hospital) a distributed storage network of exactly this architecture between several RIS and PACS systems (not only Sectra RIS and PACS), which is now being finalized based on the XDS-I concept and principles. Already today, all hospitals in southern Sweden can see any image from any examination in any other hospital in the region, regardless of PACS provider. All future products from Sectra will comply with XDS-I, both clients and servers.
How does Sectra PACS support the idea of “web-based” PACS?
Sectra PACS is today fully web-based for clinical viewing, with downloadable web viewers for clinicians that is very fast (direct comparisons done by customers have shown Sectra to be dramatically superior over networks with long latencies and equal or better to major competitors in very high bandwidth environments.) As for our primary reading workstation for the radiology department, the new workstation IDS7, using a completely new architecture made to support very fast access to large datasets, with support being network downloadable, thus bringing the entire PACS architecture to the web-based world.
What will Sectra’s focus be now and for the future?
Sectra will continue to be committed to the process efficiencies of our customers. Since the change in relationship with Philips, the revenue of Sectra medical systems has increased substantially. Contrary to what Philips and other competitors contended, our imminent death is not to be seen. We intend to keep it in that way. Today, Sectra is ranked very favorably in the US customer satisfaction survey KLAS (see the Ambulatory/Imaging Center PACS report of November 2006), far above the new Philips product, which shows that our customers who receive direct support from Sectra, or have acquired their PACS directly from Sectra, are very happy with their solution.
Our main efforts for the future in developing new products are concentrated on the rapidly changing world of radiology. With new modalities, such as dual energy and multi- modality CT and new systems in MRI, we foresee datasets of enormous volumes. Hundreds of images per exam is rapidly becoming thousands of images. Through our close partnership with leading radiology research environments, Sectra is in a pole position in this change. Try loading your PACS with a stack of 6,000 images. Most systems will simply come to a grinding halt. Yet this is an environment that you will see just a few years from now.
When you consider your PACS of the future, look for a vendor that has this change under control. Sectra is such a vendor, we can already show 6,000 stacks loaded in seconds and fully supported throughout the network. And even if you do not want to view images in that way on a regular basis, you want to be able to zoom in on the full z-axis resolution when needed and looking at coarser slices otherwise – all transparent to the user and ultra-fast. Such a change requires a software architecture that is designed for this new world and Sectra’s new architecture is! All Sectra customers will at no additional charge receive an upgrade to this new architecture when it is launched during 2008.
Many PACS vendors do not hire adequately qualified people in the field. Compared with modalities in which “service engineers” are traditionally mainly required to read a manual and follow the instructions and does not require them to really understand the inner workings of the system they service, field engineers in IT are required to understand the full system in order to be able to support it well. This is a major problem for large modality and film vendors who still hire based on this old metaphor.
When dealing with Sectra, you will meet the staff with the highest qualifications and skills in the industry. We think that customers today want a “Partner in IT,” not solely a box provider. Therefore, you will even meet the occasional PhD from Sectra in the field. And none of our staff will ever leave you disappointed with regard to their skills or their attitude. We have smart people and we are there to serve You! Think about this: When it really comes down to reality, most PACS systems today will do a reasonable job with regard to system functionality. And every PACS vendor will send its top- notch people when needed in a sales pitch before the sale. The difference between vendors is in what people you will meet after the installation. This is where Sectra shines.
Today, our customers in radiology are under pressure from all directions. Reimbursement is under severe pressure and at the same time demands are increasing. With higher image volumes and patient throughput and lower reimbursement, the most important need of radiology departments is highly efficient tools. They do not need even more bells and whistles. Radiologists of today need systems that never stop and that are rock solid in their performance. They need a system that is also blazingly fast for large datasets in high latency network environments, such as when you read from home or share reading between several institutions. And this is exactly where Sectra is today and will continue to focus. Rock solid and fast!
The world will continue to place new challenges on radiology. Outsourcing of reading, enormous amounts of data, system integration, adaptations, new reimbursements, new clinical demands, competition from clinics buying their own imaging equipment. The list is long and most of it we do not know today.
Sectra’s third cornerstone is our ability and intention to move fast when needed. We will live and innovate with you when your world changes. And we will not overcharge for this. And the world will change, and you and your PACS vendor will change with it.
Sectra will listen and innovate with you. Through our “smart people” in the field, who can guide and consult with you about static options, but also for our size and flexibility. Sectra is dedicated to IT, we live and breed IT. IT in Sectra is not a peripheral division of an ultra- large organization that, at a whim of management, may change focus tomorrow. (Many large organizations have been and are very unclear about IT). The most successful PACS vendors of the US today are pure IT companies, and there is a reason for that.
All in all, people that understand and care, efficient and effective solutions and a future-proof vendor is what you get with Sectra and Sectra PACS.
As an existing Philips customer, you may elect to stay with Sectra PACS through Philips, but you may also elect to switch your service to Sectra. In both cases, we will continue to support you.
Your PACS is a major, strategic investment, and our goal is to ensure that you can continue to derive benefit now and long into the future. Please contact us and give us an opportunity to discuss your needs. We believe that the original designer of a product can sell, service and support it better. We look forward to helping you meet your PACS requirements. Contact us at: information request form or by email at info.imtec/a/sectra/d/com.
Sectra products are installed all over the world. More than 1,000sites from all continents use Sectra's systems, together performing more than 45 million radiology examinations a year.
A PACS is a major, strategic investment, and our goal is to make sure that our PACS users can continue to derive benefit now and long into the future.
Please fill in our information request form and we will contact you to discuss your needs.
