SimonMed Looks to the Future in Partnering with Konica Minolta Healthcare to Implement the Exa^® Platform

Wayne, NJ, November 2, 2020 – Konica Minolta Healthcare Americas, Inc., announced today that SimonMed Imaging, one of the largest medical imaging providers and radiology practices in the US, has partnered with the company to successfully integrate Exa RIS throughout its centers nationwide. Exa brings together radiology workflow, patient scheduling, and patient and referring physician portals that enhance both radiology productivity and the patient experience. Designed to meet the specific needs of different providers, Exa delivers the flexibility and customization that SimonMed requires to manage the large volume of studies across facilities in multiple states and radiology sub-specialties.

“At SimonMed, we needed a robust radiology informatics platform that would help achieve our vision to reduce costs, improve the diagnoses and increase patient access,” says John Simon, MD, CEO. “Our partnership with Konica Minolta delivers the infrastructure required to adapt to changing complexities in the delivery of care, embrace new technologies such as artificial intelligence, deploy productivity tools and extend our mission of a seamless and efficient patient experience.”

Konica Minolta and SimonMed collaborated to standardize operations across facilities and systems, including consolidating reporting, reducing disparate applications at individual facilities, and deploying a common database that integrates all aspects of the patient care continuum. With the implementation of Exa RIS, SimonMed was able to eliminate many of its custom applications. A key factor in the successful implementation was Konica Minolta’s flexibility to customize applications to meet the specific needs of SimonMed and maximize staff productivity.

“The collaboration and teamwork demonstrated by Konica Minolta throughout this project was exceptional,” says Duleep Wikramanayake, Chief Information Officer, SimonMed. “Their team spent numerous hours before, during and after the sale to learn our business environment and ensure our success. Konica Minolta brings a level of flexibility to system deployment that I have rarely experienced in healthcare IT. Having the right technology is extremely important, and providing the ability to customize the platform to meet our unique needs and deliver that quickly gives us that high level of confidence that we chose the right partner for this enormous project.”

With the new platform, patients will be able to electronically check-in, pay their bill and access their own patient record. Radiologists can easily share patient imaging data and chat with referring physicians and business managers have real-time data to manage operations, referral patterns, asset utilization and staff efficiency.

“Implementing Exa RIS across the hundreds of SimonMed sites was not only one of the largest-scale deployments of the platform for our company, but we did it in a very difficult time during the pandemic” says Kevin Chlopecki, Vice President of Service Operations at Konica Minolta. “We had to adapt to the new normal and conduct training and implementation services remotely. Konica Minolta's world class customer- centric approach utilized resources across the organization, including service, product management and engineering to collaborate with SimonMed's operations team to achieve our mutual goals for success. It is a testament to the quality of people at both organizations and our mutual commitment to delivering high- quality, lower-cost and readily accessible care wherever needed. Konica Minolta is proud to partner with a forward-thinking imaging provider like SimonMed and we look forward to helping them expand the power of the Exa Platform as new technologies emerge.”