lifeIMAGE Celebrates 10th Anniversary with Major Milestones

lifeIMAGE announced today the company’s 10th anniversary and evolution from a point-to-point image exchange for hospitals in downtown Boston into a global system for sharing clinical information including patients’ medical images and information. lifeIMAGE solves the complex interoperability challenges in healthcare with a vendor-neutral, standards-based ecosystem. In the ten years since its inception, lifeIMAGE has facilitated the exchange of 2 billion medical records. The network has grown to 1,400 facilities in the United States, including the nation’s top academic facilities and integrated delivery networks. Its customers include seven of the top ten hospitals in the United States.

“The lifeIMAGE platform democratizes data and frees it from its traditional silos. Access to clinical information across a patient’s journey is the foundational requirement to enable the shift from merely exchanging episodic medical data to transforming that into information to create insights that can be applied back into clinical practice,” said lifeIMAGE President and CEO, Matthew A. Michela. “The world is talking about the potential of artificial intelligence and machine learning in healthcare, which is exciting, but interoperability, which our network uniquely provides, is essential to make any of it a reality.”

lifeIMAGE was formed 10 years ago to solve a common problem that cost the healthcare industry up to $30 billion annually in duplicative and unnecessary exams, treatment delays, and missing medical information. Today, the company enables 10 million clinical encounters each month through servicing 150,000 care providers. Since 2016, 58,000 users globally accessed the lifeIMAGE network, including Mongolia, Dubai, India, Brazil and Sweden.

“Our ten years of continued growth as an interoperable clinical network makes lifeIMAGE an attractive partner in sectors such as life sciences, clinical research, medical benefit management, AI and machine learning,” said Michela. “We have in place the best team, leadership and partners in the industry, and look forward to explosive growth over the next phase of our business.”

In addition, the company is announcing a number of new strategic advances:

• Introduced Mammosphere, a direct-to-patient engagement solution that helps to reduce the high rate of false positives in breast cancer screenings by increasing the ability of providers to access prior mammograms. The platform empowers women to control their own medical information by securely acquiring their breast health records, enhancing them, digitally storing them to maintain the diagnostic quality, and sending them to treatment providers as the patient personally determines.
• Introduced its new patient referral product, LITE (lifeIMAGE Transfer Exchange), which enables customers to expand and create their own referral networks independently and enables imaging centers, primary care physicians and other providers with a channel to bi-directionally transfer secure medical information.
• Released a new generation of its mobile app that gives physicians instant access to medical images on the go, review results and have faster ‘curbside’ consults with colleagues.
• Achieved the Security Certification to enable lifeIMAGE to integrate directly into the electronic health records (EHR) systems with the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) and the Department of Defense (DOD). This certification allows lifeIMAGE to partner with community providers to expand healthcare access to veterans. The connectivity helps improve care coordination and support the transfer of records from army medical centers to any facility across the 1400+ hospitals in the lifeIMAGE network.
• Deployed Healthcare Solutions Executive Scott Maratea as Senior Vice President of Sales, Marketing and Business Development and doubled the company’s market-facing team size.

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) recently remarked that interoperability is a national challenge. lifeIMAGE is already leading the way in this area and continues to develop new initiatives to make the goal of “bridging the gap between provider and patient information systems everywhere” a reality.

Scott Maratea, Senior Vice President at lifeIMAGE, noted, “The issue with interoperability in healthcare is not the lack of a single data standard. The problem is too many standards. Our goal at lifeIMAGE is to improve care delivery by simplifying all of this complexity. Participating in the lifeIMAGE network should be like buying any cell phone you desire. It should not matter what the standard is or which devices or applications you choose to use, you have to be able to ‘talk’ to exchange any and all data with anyone else.”

About lifeIMAGE

lifeIMAGE is a medical information network connecting health care networks, providers and patients to imaging records. lifeIMAGE enables access to images and clinical information for more than 150,000 providers at 1,400 facilities across clinical specialties and across institutions globally. Providers use lifeIMAGE to improve the quality and timeliness of care, expand referral business and eliminate wasteful spending. For more information about lifeIMAGE, please visit: www.lifeimage.com, check out our blog or follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

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