In 2005, I founded ClearCanvas on the simple, unwavering belief that medical imaging informatics should be accessible to all - whether you work at a small imaging clinic north of the Arctic Circle or a large hospital in Sao Paulo, everyone should have access to the fundamental tools of patient care. This core belief is what originally drove me to make our products open source from the start. I wanted to make sure that everyone, regardless of economic means, had access to high quality imaging informatics software.
Beginning with our first product release in 2006, our journey has led from the development of a comprehensive open source RIS/PACS solution used by a large number of university hospitals to releasing regulatory-approved commercial products that are now sold worldwide. Our platforms have increased in functionality and are now used throughout the industry by a variety of companies including Sentinelle Medical (now Hologic), lifeIMAGE, and Cirdan Imaging to advance their development efforts. We have released a number of workstation products and continue to develop new solutions to advance patient care. Most importantly though, I am thrilled to see that our software is being used to advance research at leading edge facilities in the United States as well as by remote clinics in sub-Saharan Africa. This is why we built ClearCanvas.
While the introduction of commercial versions of our products represented a transition for the company, we continue to be fully committed to our open source products as they are an integral part of our mission. We will continue to actively develop them and make them available to the world.
As I look ahead to the future, I am very excited about the numerous developments underway at ClearCanvas. We are currently in the process of adding cloud-based functionality to our products which will support immediate, secure transmission of images for referring physicians, teleradiology practices, and other practitioners. We are also expanding our support for third-party plugins, updating our software to support new languages (Spanish, German, and Portuguese, amongst others), and adding a variety of new clinical tools. In addition to all of this, we are redesigning our workstation so that we can release a zero footprint, fully diagnostic, web-based version to allow clinicians to review images on any mobile device. I believe that many of our users will be pleased with these upcoming releases.
My vision for ClearCanvas has always been to be a company that measures its success not only in terms of its balance sheet, but also in terms of the lives that it changes, be those of doctors, patients, researchers or our growing network of business partners around the world. I invite all of you to stay on this journey with us as we continue to revolutionize imaging informatics one step at a time.
Norman Young
President & CEO