Please review my Startup: PacsDrive - Medical Image Archiving | Hacker News Reader

Please review my Startup: PacsDrive - Medical Image Archiving

9 pointsdmillar11 comments

http://www.pacsdrive.com

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).

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.

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.

What do you think?

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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".

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

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???)

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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

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

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.

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