BridgeHead and Laurel Bridge Announce Partnership to Assist Hospitals With Image Management

WOBURN, MA and ASHTEAD, UNITED KINGDOM and NEWARK, DE--(Marketwired - Nov 13, 2013) - BridgeHead Software, a leader in healthcare data management, and Laurel Bridge Software, a leading provider of imaging workflow and DICOM software solutions to the medical imaging industry, today announced their formalization of a partnership to benefit mutual hospital customers. As part of this partnership, Laurel Bridge will offer Bridgehead's VNA (vendor-neutral archive) as a complement to Laurel Bridge's medical imaging workflow solutions. BridgeHead will continue to offer Laurel Bridge's image routing and tag-morphing solutions to improve implementation workflows and ingestion of DICOM studies into its VNA.

BridgeHead and Laurel Bridge already have an established track record of working together to serve hospitals, such as at Marian Community Hospital in Carbondale, PA. This hospital was forced to close its doors in February 2012. As part of closing, the hospital was responsible for migrating patient record data including DICOM images to Catholic Health East (CHE), which is another provider in the state. Laurel Bridge and BridgeHead worked together to assist Marian with this migration, establishing a BridgeHead VNA repository at CHE while managing the migration of the data from Marian as an on-going project. This project is an excellent example of the impact of healthcare consolidation on hospital operations and demonstrates how hospitals remain responsible for patient health information (PHI) even long after their doors are closed. For more details on this project, please read our related blog entry.

"Our imaging workflow and ingestion capabilities are complementary to BridgeHead's VNA and data management," said Mark Blair, CEO of Laurel Bridge Software. "By formalizing our partnership, we make it easier for hospitals to work with both of our organizations as part of a holistic DICOM migration and VNA project."

"Some people have argued that workflow should be incorporated with the VNA but we believe our solution is superior," said Jim Beagle, CEO, BridgeHead Software. "Partnering with Laurel Bridge enables our customers to gain the full benefit of their migration and workflow capabilities as part of our VNA projects more easily, and enables them to add clinical workflow as part of BridgeHead VNA should they desire it."

Interactive Resources

Read our story about the migration of DICOM data from Marian Community Hospital to Catholic Health East at:

http://www.bridgeheadsoftware.com/company/blog/what_happens_to_medical_images_when_a_hospital_closes_its_doors_with_laurel/

Come see BridgeHead and Laurel Bridge at RSNA 2013:

• BridgeHead will be exhibiting in booth 4573, in South Hall A.
• Laurel Bridge will be exhibiting in booth 5311, in South Hall A.

Read the blog Q&A with Laurel Bridge Software at:

http://www.bridgeheadsoftware.com/company/blog/laurel_bridge_weighs_in/

About Laurel Bridge

Laurel Bridge Software provides workflow solutions for medical imaging, including highly configurable enterprise routing, fetching, migrating, and workflow management technologies. Robust and reliable DICOM software, utilities and applications are available for the development, support, and integration of medical imaging devices, applications, and networks.

Engineers from Laurel Bridge Software and its sister company, Blair Computing Systems, Inc., have been developing medical imaging products systems for more than twenty-five years. Do more, spend less! For more information, visit http://www.laurelbridge.com .

About BridgeHead Software

With 20 years' experience in data and storage management, and 12 years in healthcare, BridgeHead Software is trusted by over 1,000 hospitals worldwide. Today, BridgeHead Software helps healthcare facilities overcome challenges stemming from rising data volumes and increasing storage costs while delivering peace of mind around how to store, protect and share clinical and administrative information.

BridgeHead's Healthcare Data Management (HDM) solutions are designed to work with any hospital's chosen applications and storage hardware, regardless of vendor, providing greater choice, flexibility and control over the way data is managed, now and in the future. For more information, visit http://www.bridgeheadsoftware.com or follow on Twitter at @BridgeHeadHDM.