Healthcare providers at every level face mounting pressures to improve care and reduce medical errors, adhere to strict patient-privacy mandates, ensure security and regulatory compliance, move from paper records to electronic ones, and trim costs.
Fairfield, NJ (PRWEB) December 14, 2016
Buyers Laboratory LLC (BLI), a division of Keypoint Intelligence, and the world’s leading independent evaluator of document imaging software, hardware and services, today announced that four solutions providers are the recipients of 2017 BLI PaceSetter awards for the Healthcare market. Given once a year, this award recognizes the vendors that offer the most impressive portfolios of devices, solutions and services for healthcare providers in two broad markets: Hospital Networks and Group Practices. The winners for the 2017 calendar year, based on research conducted in late 2016, are:
CANON U.S.A., INC.
BLI PaceSetter 2017 Healthcare: Hospital Networks
KONICA MINOLTA BUSINESS SOLUTIONS U.S.A., INC.
BLI PaceSetter 2017 Healthcare: Hospital Networks
HP INC.
BLI PaceSetter 2017 Healthcare: Group Practices
LEXMARK INTERNATIONAL, INC.
BLI PaceSetter 2017 Healthcare: Group Practices
“Healthcare providers at every level face mounting pressures to improve care and reduce medical errors, adhere to strict patient-privacy mandates, ensure security and regulatory compliance, move from paper records to electronic ones, and trim costs wherever possible,” noted Jamie Bsales, Director, Office Workflow Solutions Analysis at BLI. “Document imaging vendors are uniquely positioned to help address these challenges with solutions that streamline processes and bring together the worlds of paper-based and electronic information.”
For this first-of-its-kind study, BLI invited all leading document imaging OEMs to complete an exhaustive questionnaire detailing their healthcare-relevant offerings in eight key areas: Hardware, Software, Service and Support, Professional Services, Security, Industry Certifications, Vertical Leadership, and Overall Value. OEMs that opted to participate were also asked to make key personnel available for in-depth interviews with the BLI analyst team to give a more complete picture of the vendors’ strategies for the healthcare market. After gathering all the data, BLI’s team used a proprietary rating scale to calculate point totals in the key areas studied. Since different segments of the healthcare market have different needs, BLI’s analysts created one rating rubric weighted to reflect the challenges faced by large hospital networks, and a second geared toward multi-site group practices.
“While all four of this year’s winning participants scored well in both the Hospital Networks and Group Practices analyses, Canon and Konica Minolta scored particularly well in areas most important to regional medical networks, while HP and Lexmark were essentially tied in our study when it came to hardware, software, and services best suited to small to mid-size practitioner partnerships, clinics, and small hospitals,” noted BLI’s Bsales.
Winning Portfolios for Hospital Networks
Canon earned points in the Hardware category thanks to its feature-rich Canon imageRUNNER ADVANCE A3 MFPs, imageCLASS A4 printers and MFPs, imageFORMULA scanners, and production and wide-format printers. It also scored well in the Software category thanks to the flexible uniFLOW platform, the RightFax Healthcare Direct fax and Direct Messaging partner solution, and a wide range of other Canon and partner solutions. On the services front, Canon offers a secure Digital Conversion Service for Healthcare that migrates paper records to digital form for providers, as well as enterprise managed services with a specialized Healthcare Advisory Team. Canon also offers a host of solutions beyond document imaging and managed services, including radiology and ophthalmology equipment, network video surveillance solutions to monitor hospital premises, and LCOS projection systems ideal for university/teaching hospitals.
Konica Minolta stood out in BLI’s analysis thanks to its excellent bizhub family of output/capture devices, including its specialized bizhub SECURE Healthcare MFPs that include encryption, password-protection, authentication, logging and other features to create HIPAA-complaint bizhub out of the box. The company also offers its Dispatcher Phoenix for Healthcare document capture/processing/routing solution, the groundbreaking MFP-resident Direct Messaging solution (developed with partner Kno2), and a host of specialized solutions. Konica Minolta is a leader in the “telemedicine” arena thanks to its investment in SnapMD, which lets doctors interact with patients remotely. In addition, the Konica Minolta parent company offers a range of medical imaging hardware and solutions through its Konica Minolta Healthcare Americas subsidiary. On the services front, the company maintains a dedicated Healthcare Services division that works exclusively with large healthcare customers, and its All Covered IT services division can handle the IT needs of customers and even provide HIPAA certification training when needed.
Invaluable Partners for Group Practices
HP won its category in large part thanks to its wide range of hardware that helps streamline clinical workflows and improve how caregivers engage with patients. The company has worked to make the technology required in an interaction more transparent so the interaction can be more personal. For example, the company’s tablet offerings allow a doctor or nurse to be face-to-face with a patient while reviewing and gathering information, rather than having their back turned to use a PC. BLI analyst also noted that HP offers a robust family of desktop A4 printers and MFPs ideal for the tight confines of reception/administration areas and examination rooms. And notably, devices based on PageWide technology are among the few output devices to carry a cleanroom certification for use in surgery centers and other locations where such certification is a must. In addition to its strengths in hardware, HP’s software and services help ensure higher levels of security and compliance, while its Enterprise Test Lab capabilities ensure performance of the hardware and software together as a system.
Lexmark performed well in the Group Practices analysis thanks to its excellent lineup of A4 and A3 laser MFPs and printers that cover any need a doctor’s office, clinic, or small hospital is likely to have. Beyond the hardware, the company offers solutions ideal for such settings, such as Lexmark Document Distributor for easily capturing, digitizing, and routing paper documents at their point of entry into an organization. BLI analysts were also impressed with the Lexmark Downtime Reports solution, which lets an organization automatically store critical reports and forms on an MFP’s hard drive so admissions and other tasks can continue even if such collateral is unavailable from the network server due to an outage. On the services front, Lexmark employs healthcare-specific pre- and post-sales support teams (many of whom come from the industry) to handle all aspects of the deployment and roll-out of a customer’s chosen solutions.
About Buyers Laboratory LLC
Buyers Laboratory LLC (BLI) is the world's leading independent provider of analytical information and services to the digital imaging and document management industry. For over 50 years, buyers have relied on BLI to help them differentiate products’ strengths and weaknesses and make the best purchasing decisions, while industry sales, marketing and product professionals have turned to BLI for insightful competitive intelligence and valued guidance on product development, competitive positioning and sales channel and marketing support. Using BLI’s web-based bliQ and Solutions Center services, 40,000 professionals worldwide create extensive side-by-side comparisons of hardware and software solutions for over 15,000 products globally, including comprehensive specifications and the performance results and ratings from BLI’s unparalleled Lab, Solutions and Environmental Test Reports, the result of months of hands-on evaluation in its US and UK labs. The services, also available via mobile devices, include a comprehensive library of BLI’s test reports, an image gallery, hard to find manufacturers’ literature and valuable tools for configuring products, calculating total cost of ownership (TCO) and annual power usage. BLI also offers consulting and private, for-hire testing services that help manufacturers develop and market better products and consumables.
About Keypoint Intelligence
Keypoint Intelligence is a global data and market intelligence leader for the digital imaging industry. The company has over 125 professionals around the world who provide critical planning and go-to-market services, including in-depth market research, competitive intelligence, sales training, product testing, content creation, and customer engagement.
For more information, contact Mike Fergus at mike.fergus(at)buyerslab(dot)com or +1 973.797.2150.