Just months after exiting from stealth last August with $62.5 million in Series A and B financing, San Francisco-based Sirona Medical, a software company, announced its first acquisition: Nines’ Radiology AI division. Sirona declined to disclose the financial terms of the acquisition.
The deal had several key components. Sirona absorbed Nines’ advanced clinical data pipeline, machine learning engines, radiology workflow management and analytics tools, and its two FDA cleared radiology diagnostic products. Sirona hopes its platform makes the AI adoption at scale more seamless.
Sirona has a RadOS platform, which unifies several disparate components of the radiology IT stack, from the viewer to the worklist, to the reporter.
Nines has a teleradiology practice, proprietary worklist, practice management software, and AI capabilities, which it incorporates into the radiology workflow. However, Nines historically struggled with system integration since it depended on radiology’s fragmented IT systems, as do many other radiology practices and developers.
“The combination of Nines AI-powered tools plugged into Sirona’s unified RadOS platform, will equip both developers and radiology practices with the infrastructure needed to optimize and deploy AI at scale,” said Cameron Andrews, CEO of Sirona Medical in an email. “Nines’ assets were extremely attractive to us because of the significant progress [it has] made to date on [its] advanced FDA-cleared algorithms NinesMeasure, a lung nodule measurement algorithm that leverages AI to accelerate the diagnoses of certain respiratory diseases, and NinesAI Emergent Triage, a set of AI-powered algorithms that triage time-critical, life-threatening indications of intracranial hemorrhage and mass effect.”
Though AI as a transformational technology offers great value, integrating it with existing radiology workflows has proved a sticking point for many in the radiology community, according to Andrews. Integration is so challenging that successful AI companies in the space avoid the traditional workflow all together, limiting the types of applications and ultimately the impact that AI could potentially have on the field of radiology, Andrews said.
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“Sirona has identified that the existing infrastructure, with its siloed applications and fragmented legacy vendors, is a significant barrier to AI adoption. To address this, we have built a cloud-native, unified RadOS platform to ease workflow burdens and improve the use of AI in practice,” said Andrews.
Despite this, convincing radiology practices to leave their old setup for a more promising option is easier said than done. Doing so often requires proof of quantifiable improvements, like time savings, increases in productivity, and improved clinical outcomes, according to Andrews.
“Radiologists don’t want to buy AI — they want to buy value (efficiency and quality), and as reimbursement rates continue to compress year after year, they need to find ways to do so within the bounds of their existing software budget,” Andrews said. “That’s what this acquisition will ultimately deliver: a one-stop, turnkey solution for radiology practices that will allow them to better compete and thrive in today’s challenging environment.”
If Sirona can deliver on this promise, radiology practices stand to benefit. Sirona hopes its RadOS platform will provide a single vendor option, negating the need for managing multiple systems, an especially desirable outcome for practices spanning multiple facilities and across states. And many companies could potentially benefit.
At the 2021 meeting of the Radiological Society of North America, over 150 AI companies attended, according to Andrews. Simultaneously, the last several months brought about changes in the field, with RadNet acquiring Aidence and MaxQ discontinuing its Accipio portfolio, he explained. It seems AI companies are reevaluating and reconstructing their go to market strategy to include more fully integrated solutions rather than standalone AI point solutions.
“The key question is if integrated solutions need to be part of a larger radiology practice like RadNet or RadPartners, or if a new entrant like Sirona can provide that solution in a more scalable way to large and independent radiology practices across the country,” said Andrews. “We want to give practices the tools to build competitive advantages for themselves, but we also believe that the future of radiology should belong to radiologists.”
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