When a doctor in a remote town needs help analyzing an X-ray of a child’s broken leg, the last thing he or she should worry about is whether the image can be read by a specialist thousands of miles away.

Apollo, a Falls Church, Va.-based developer of clinical multimedia solutions, seeks to solve this issue with the release of Apollo Enterprise Patient Media Manager (EPMM), a so called “device-agnostic” software platform that’s designed to collect distributed patient media into one unified record.
 
“It looks at the problem from a clinician’s perspective, bringing it all to the clinician’s desktop,” said Mark Newburger, the company’s CEO. “It really is a multimedia manager.”

Launched in 1993 as a telemedicine company, Apollo created digital pathology management and telepathology solutions for clinical and research laboratories before moving into the PACS market in 2003. Newburger said the company focuses on coordinating data from older, legacy systems so that it can be read easily and quickly – a critical issue at a time when hospitals and other healthcare providers don’t have the funding to purchase new hardware or software.

“You’re not going to go into a hospital and replace all the IT in the hospital,” he said. “We look to enhance legacy systems instead of replacing them.”

An early user of Apollo EPMM is The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, which communicates with doctors and clinics throughout Ontario. The hospital implemented the dermatology module of EPMM in May and plans on going live with the rest of the system in September or October.

“Our clinicians were capturing a significant number of images; however, they were stored in different ways, making it extremely difficult to access and retrieve the images when they were most needed,” said Daniela Crivianu-Gaita, the hospital’s CIO. “ When we recognized the challenge our clinicians were up against, we engaged Apollo for a centrally-managed enterprise solution that would meet clinician workflow requirements, integrate with other clinical systems and ensure secure, easy and efficient access to patient images.”

Newburger sees plenty of uses for EPMM.

“The healthcare record is going electronic,” he said. “The patient expects (diagnostic records and images) to become part of their medical record.”