Intelerad in 2020: Harnessing a bright past for an even brighter future

What a whirlwind this year has been, and we are just starting the month of October. Given that our fiscal year begins on August 1st, we at Intelerad, are already well into 2020, working to achieve our very ambitious goals and all the while making a real difference in healthcare.

This past year, as Intelerad’s new president and CEO, was both a tremendous honor and a motivating challenge. In this relatively short time frame, I had the chance to see first hand how robust the company is, how passionate and driven its worldwide team is, and how promising the future looks for all of us. A promising future, resting firmly on a solid and fascinating history.

Intelerad celebrated its 20th anniversary this year. Twenty years since our founders devised one of the first filmless radiology solution and started selling IntelePACS^® and InteleViewer^™. Since then, our story has been tightly intertwined with that of the field radiology itself, allowing us to grow and evolve with our clients.

Twenty years ago, we started building an international client base: Intelerad’s first clients were based in Canada and Australia. Our subsequent expansion efforts led us to New Zealand, the United States, and the United Kingdom. We continue to grow these all markets today and eyeing new ones for future expansion.

Our past successes and future ambitions are made possible by our people. And 2019 was a record year for Intelerad in terms of the size of our workforce: we now have over 430 Inteleraiders working remotely or in our offices across the world.

From our humble beginnings at the McGill University Health Centre in Montreal, we now have offices in Calgary, Toronto, Melbourne, Hertfordshire and Seattle. Still, more than 70% of our people work out of our head office in Montreal. Initially scattered in different offices, the entire Montreal team was finally assembled early 2019, in our brand new headquarters in the city’s bustling downtown area. Our new offices enabled us to bring everyone together, and will also allow us to continue growing. Indeed, we expect our workforce to double in size within the next 5 years, with at least 300 positions to be filled in Montreal and around the world, as we continue to build innovative, scalable and reliable solutions and focus on servicing our customers.

To help us deliver on our strategic imperatives, Intelerad acquired Clario Medical last November. This acquisition allows us to increase our US footprint, a market which we plan to pursue quite intensely in the coming years, focusing especially on the radiology productivity, clinical accessibility and IT manageability requirements on the markets that we serve (e.g. large reading groups, private practices, hospitals, IDNs). Clario’s SmartWorklist^™ is proving to be a great workflow tool that complements our product offer and allow us to enable faster, smarter diagnostics from anywhere. This aligns with our approach to building technology that helps radiologists efficiently maximize the value that they add.

We announced the Clario acquisition at last year’s RSNA. It was my first time attending the event as Intelerad’s new president and CEO, and I didn’t really know what to expect. What I saw in 2018 was shockingly inspiring, to say the least. But let me tell you, we are set to make an even bigger splash this year, with our biggest booth to date and our largest contingent of experts. RSNA is where all the pieces come together, where a lot of our efforts come to fruition. This is where we deliver on our strategic imperatives: state-of-the-art solutions, continuous customer focus, overall growth through sales and partnerships. Our success at this event rests on the shoulders of the many Inteleraiders involved in its planning but also in building the products and services that we will demonstrate at the show; I’d like to take this opportunity to thank each and everyone of them for their hard work.

Just as the industry is moving towards cloud services, interoperability, artificial intelligence and ever-increasing productivity, so too Intelerad is working on integrating these trends into its product offer. To do so, we need to ensure we are always ahead of the game, always thinking of ways to innovate and improve. Back in May, we announced a 75$M investment in R&D to help us further develop our capacity in that regard. On that occasion, we also committed to a vision, which we work every day to deliver. This vision includes achieving a unified SmartWorklist, transforming InteleViewer into a zero footprint tool, leveraging AI worklist prioritization and intelligent routing, as well as integrating partners for archiving and for clinical display of other ‘ologies, among our many initiatives. Delivering on that vision, however, also implies a continuing focus on ensuring the performance, security, scalability, reliability and serviceability of all our solutions that are on customer premises or sitting in the cloud.

There is much to look forward to, and much to be proud of. So stay tuned, as I share more about Intelerad, our people, our partners and our initiatives with this new blog. Do let me know if you have topic suggestions or even questions for me; I’m always happy to share, learn, inspire and be inspired.

Until next time,

Paul.