John Chambers
Managing Director, OrthoView
Q: Briefly, how does OrthoView fit into the orthopaedics world?
A: When radiology departments stop printing film, Orthopaedic surgeons need a solution for planning and templating surgical procedures. OrthoView is the clinical application that makes that viable and provides access to the world’s largest digital template library. With digital x-rays, OrthoView has taken orthopaedic planning to the next level with specialist paediatric and fracture management modules and numerous anatomical assessment tools. In fact, we pride ourselves on understanding the orthopaedic surgeon’s needs, and being able to provide the tools for the job in a digital environment.
Q: OrthoView has achieved rapid growth since its establishment seven years ago. What do you consider are the key factors in contributing to this growth?
A: PACS vendors quickly encountered resistance from the Orthopaedic community when they tried to stop printing film. Traditionally, surgeons have used acetate prosthesis templates overlaid on hardcopy x-ray film. The PACS vendors were unable to supply an alternative, and you could say that we were able to spot a gap in the market. In hindsight, I certainly think it would be true to say that OrthoView had the right solution at the right time on a technology platform that could be easily integrated into a vendor’s PACS. With the ability to support multiple languages and robust regulatory compliance it was easy for them to sell OrthoView on a global basis. Our growth mirrored their success in bringing PACS to the market.
Another factor in our success has been our ability to supply a complete solution, from the initial assessment to the detailed preoperative planning. OrthoView’s intuitive planning wizards mean that images can be scaled quickly and accurately. You don’t have to be an IT expert to use OrthoView – it is easy to learn and in fact, one statistic I like to quote is that you can template a hip in 60 seconds.
Q: Your product portfolio appears to be ‘right’ for the market. What is the secret behind your success?
A: Right from the word go we have worked closely with the orthopaedic community and this has paid off for us. For instance, we work with leading orthopaedic surgeons who are specialists in their field to fine tune OrthoView’s features and we are also very quick to react to their feedback. We currently hold in our library over 18,000 digital templates from all the major manufacturers including Stryker, DePuy, Biomet, Smith & Nephew, Zimmer, Finsbury, JRI and Corin.
All our templates are created from original data to ensure accuracy and incorporate the surgical guidelines associated with the particular prosthesis. In addition, the templates are kept up-to-date and held by us on-line for quick and easy download. Going the extra mile and taking the trouble to listen to our customers, establishing their exact needs and also making it easy to change over to digital are all factors in our success.
Q: Why do you think it is so important to deploy OrthoView via the Web?
A: Our philosophy has always been to work closely with Orthopaedic Surgeons to understand their clinical and workflow requirements. Today a surgeon needs access to clinical applications like OrthoView wherever they are working, whether they are in their office, in theatre, or at home. OrthoView’s Web deployment, together with high speed internet access, makes this a reality and is an important cornerstone to our technology platform.
Q: You have previously noted that most customers buy OrthoView either with, or as part of their PACS. What happens if they already have a PACS system?
A: If a hospital bought a PACS without any digital orthopaedic planning functionality, it’s likely that they are still printing film for their Orthopaedic surgeons. Since many of their business cases for buying PACS were based upon deploying a truly film-less environment, OrthoView is the final piece of technology required to go truly film-less and realise those benefits. To facilitate the deployment of OrthoView in a legacy PACS environment we typically offer a Web deployed solution with a DICOM proxy server. This translates to a low cost, single modality connection to the PACS with OrthoView being available on any PC on the network.
The great news is that in North America and the UK they can now buy that solution directly from us at a price that is always attractive compared to printing film!
Q: What does the future hold for OrthoView?
A: ANSWToday our comprehensive product portfolio, covering an extensive library of high quality digital templates, and planning wizards, enable us to make the claim to be the most widely used planning and templating solution in the world.
Our vision is to provide an orthopaedic surgeon with a wide range of clinical functionality in a logical and consistent manner, with seamless connectivity to multi-vendor PACS platforms, and in the future, I see us collaborating with a number of technology partners to quickly make this vision a reality; 3D tools and Navigation support are typical examples.ER
