

Please review my Startup: PacsDrive - Medical Image Archiving - dmillar

http://www.pacsdrive.com<p>Medical imaging is not like the JPGs you shoot with your camera. It uses a specialized format and transfer protocol called DICOM. DICOM compatible backup systems cost a lot of money ($25k on the low end, or $3 per exam).<p>We've created a cloud service that is more cost effective for small to medium sized health care providers and gives the simplicity only the web can offer.<p>We applied to the summer round for YComb, but I pulled the application because I felt we weren't quite ready. We're hoping PG and co will take a look later this year.<p>What do you think?
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RK
I am somewhat familiar with the PACS situation (quick summary: frustrating as
hell if you're used to open/commodity style technologies).

I was about to suggest some kind of plugin for OsiriX, but then I looked in
your Help section and saw that one is already in the works...

What is needed is more open source options for PACS, especially servers, and
your service may play a role in making things reasonable. OsiriX is very nice
but unfortunately OS X only.

Also, it might be interesting to integrate this with remote image reading
applications used by consulting/remote radiologists, since the images will
already be "in the cloud".

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dmillar
Yes, yes, and yes :)

We feel there is a lot of room for feature growth, and much of what you
mentioned is being considered.

Mind dropping me your email? dmillar at pacsdrive.com

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bdmac97
I like the look of your site but that's probably because, to me, it looks
almost exactly like CampaignMonitor. Very clean and well layed out but
verrrrry similar.

Your information and what you do is very clean and easy to grok although it's
not really a field/area I can comment on much.

You may want to consider adding your site to my latest endeavor,
<http://www.launchly.com>. Launchly is all about getting your new site the
feedback you need to succeed. Launches are free for the time being.

One other comment, I tried to contact you via your site's contact us page but
your app 500'd on me and I got the "Rails Screen of Death" (RSoD???)

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sutro
I see a couple of problems here: 1) I don't see the word "Twitter" mentioned
anywhere in your marketing copy, 2) there doesn't seem to be an option for
adding cute little PacsDrive characters to my Facebook wall, 3) bad idea to
charge money for this -- you should be giving everything away for free, 4) I
don't see a jobs page advertising open reqs for ninjas and/or rockstars.

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cinkler
You might offer a way for users to get backup of their images on some media.
They might feel more secure knowing that they can get hard copy of their data
by courier if they wish.

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dmillar
We do offer hard drive or DVD restores to be shipped.

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sdesol
From a design point of view, I think it's polished. From a "is there a market
for this?", I can't say. Can you list off any competitors for comparison?

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dmillar
Any PACS vendor is potentially a competitor. However, a PACS is a much larger
solution that this. Really PacsDrive is just the 'A' in PACS (picture
archiving and communication system).

Of course, data warehousing companies like Roark Data are competitors, but
they provide an in-house and large scale solutions.

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vparihar
This looks good and promising!! Most importantly, it is solving a problem. I
think you have a great chance of getting accepted. Good luck!!

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kikislc
How do you propose to gain the market's attention when competing (albeit
indirectly) against mega corps like GE and McKesson?

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dmillar
GE and McKesson's market are hospital corporations. Our customers are small
clinics and imaging centers. The minimum price to setup a DICOM compliant
archive is about $25k and that is not counting required support personnel. We
do it for $99/month, and we are about 10,000x more accessible than either of
those companies for customer service and support.

I do worry about marketing, however. I am hoping this is where we can garnish
advice from people like PG (et al). How do we penetrate a market that is so
difficult to change? I've seen first hand health care facilities choose more
expensive solutions that were inferior products.

