BridgeHead and Laurel Bridge announce partnership

BridgeHead Software and Laurel Bridge Software have 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.”