Intelerad Medical Systems has been on quite the growth spree and we don't expect the Canadian company to slow down anytime soon.

Based in Montreal, Intelerad has made three acquisitions in the past six months. Most recently, the imaging software company bought Oakland, CA-based Lumedx, a provider of healthcare analytics and cardiovascular information systems. Financial terms were not disclosed but it comes on the heels of the company's Digisonics' acquisition in December, and its Radius acquisition in August.

“Healthcare as we know it has forever changed, and more than ever, providers need automated solutions that allow them to focus on what they do best – treating patients and providing improved patient care,” said Intelerad CEO Mike Lipps. “Bringing Lumedx into the Intelerad portfolio further enables our team to provide customers with the most comprehensive enterprise imaging platform in the industry.”

As MD+DI has previously reported, cardiovascular procedures (and all non-emergency procedures) saw a major decline last year as hospitals turned their focus and resources to the COVID-19 pandemic. As these procedures continue to rebound in 2021, Intelerad sees a critical need to deliver comprehensive enterprise imaging platform — including robust cardiovascular offerings — to hospitals, health systems, and imaging centers.

Last year Intelerad was awarded Best in KLAS Recognition for PACS Asia/Oceania in the 2020 Best in KLAS Global Report. Intelerad itself was acquired last year by Hg, a specialist private equity investor.

"They took ownership of the company just about a year ago, right before the pandemic hit, and then we really started to execute this strategy to be able to grow and expand from what has traditionally been a very successful teleradiology company," Lipps told MD+DI.

Hospitals and healthcare systems are under tremendous pressure from payers to deliver value-based care, which is why they rarely make standalone, independent purchasing decisions, Lipps said. He said the hospitals and healthcare systems are not looking for just a single radiology solution, but rather they want to try and get economies of scale through a broader imaging platform.

"If you think about just the cardiovascular space all by itself — and cardio is very different than radiology — it's not just an image but it's also a whole series of data integrations that have to come together to enable a cardiologist to be able to do his or her job," Lipps said. "Our view was that having a world class radiology PACS [picture archiving and communications system] the way Intelerad has already had that comes complete with a world class work list tool and a terrific enterprise viewer, that if we could integrate that platform with a complete cardiovascular service line solution ... the benefit you're bringing hospitals now is fewer integrations to be able to manage their images is going to give them the ability to enable collaboration amongst radiologists and cardiologists and practitioners that happen to be in the hospital or working in any remote area, which as we all know post-pandemic is certainly going to be the norm for a long, long time."

Telemedicine is here to stay

As the pandemic has changed the way physicians work, Intelerad was already uniquely positioned to address that challenge as the company has specialized in teleradiology for a long time, enabling radiologists to work from anywhere in the world and to collaborate on images with experts in other locations, Lipps said.

"At the end of the day, and to the extent that we can provide a singular archive for all images in a hospital, it's going to enable faster retrieval, lower costs, and ultimately better outcomes for patients," he said.

Of course the real promise of telemedicine is in rural areas where, until recently, patients receiving a medical imaging test just had to hope that the best available doctor in their area could look at and interpret the image. Now, those images can be looked at and interpreted by the world's leading specialist no matter where they are located in the world, and it can happen in the same amount of time as the local specialist doctor could have done it five or six years ago, Lipps said.

"That's the marriage of technology and the amazing men and women that are in these cardiology and radiology jobs.

We expect that Intelerad's growth spurt is far from over.

"We are just getting started," Lipps told MD+DI. "We we see a lot of opportunity in this marketplace, and the beauty of being well funded and capitalized means that we're going to continue to look for ways to execute this strategy and to deliver the best enterprise imaging platform in the market."