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CHICAGO, Nov. 30 /PRNewswire/ -- Today at the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) Annual Meeting, Fujifilm Medical Systems USA announced that it has expanded its Synapse Managed Services capabilities to now include RIS hosting and tele-RIS capabilities.(1) The company has also established a partnership with Evolved Digital Solutions, Inc., Brentwood, Tenn., and will provide hosted RIS and off site archiving to their customers. These new developments are expected to further bolster the growth of Fujifilm's successful and rapidly growing Managed Services business unit.

True to its name, Managed Services was designed to enable Fujifilm to manage Synapse(R) PACS and its related IT functions, freeing facilities to fully concentrate on the delivery of care. The comprehensive Managed Services offering -- which originally comprised a set of turnkey, high-reliability solutions including software, system management, PACS hosting and disaster recovery -- now also includes RIS hosting, making Fujifilm the first major vendor to have this complete package. Made possible through the innovative use of virtualization technology, Fujifilm's RIS hosting is providing benefits for both existing and new Synapse Managed Services customers.

"With the addition of RIS hosting we can now deliver new opportunities for existing customers who are currently performing distributed diagnosis, as well as dramatically decrease start-up time and expense for new radiology group customers who want to maintain their focus on providing quality patient care," explained Reynold Yordy, Fujifilm's Business Manager, Managed Services. "Additionally, by leveraging the latest in virtualization technology, we've been able to speed deployment, increase system availability, and provide a more eco-friendly environment by reducing power consumption."

Tele-RIS services are another new addition to Synapse Managed Services. Designed particularly with the needs of teleradiology in mind, the tele-RIS functionality comes in the form of a single (otherwise known as a global) worklist. As the name implies, the single worklist enables radiology groups that read for multiple facilities with disparate PACS to have a single view of all studies they need to interpret. Because all orders and information are driven to one RIS, it creates tremendous efficiencies by eliminating the need for repetitively logging in and out of multiple systems. Having a single platform to read from also aids radiologist workflow by enabling the use of just one integrated RIS/PACS/Reportingplatform, versus having to learn and use as many different systems as there are different hospitals being serviced.

Fujifilm has also added to the Managed Services model through the newly established partnership with Evolved Digital Solutions, Inc. Evolved's RIS customers are actively being converted to Fujifilm's RIS and the Managed Services model, thus assuring that they can gain value from advanced technology they need and expect from an established and growing organization. Just some of the capabilities that the Evolved base will now benefit from include scheduling, billing, mammography tracking, and greater flexibility in communicating with referring physicians.

"From the start Fujifilm has had a clear differentiator by designing Managed Services as a true business model for productivity and growth, and not just as a simple hosting and recovery service," said Yordy. "We're excited about our new capabilities and our strategic partnership, and expect that they will continue to foster the unprecedented growth we've been experiencing."

During the past year the company has expanded the data center two and a half times its original size, and new customer growth is up 130 percent over the previous 12 months. Additionally, bandwidth has been increased ten times to speed the delivery of studies to all users.

For more information on Synapse Managed Services, visit RSNA booth #4039.

About FUJIFILM Medical Systems USA, Inc.

As one of the FUJIFILM Corporation family of companies with 70 years of imaging experience and more than $28 billion in sales, FUJIFILM Medical Systems USA, Inc. is a leading provider of diagnostic imaging products and network systems to meet the needs of healthcare facilities today and well into the future. Fujifilm's Synapse(R) PACS (picture archiving and communications system) provides a seamless solution for managing, storing and distributing images and information throughout the entire healthcare enterprise. Its Web integrated design and hardware-independence provide a technological infrastructure and deployment model that can be expanded upon in a myriad of ways to adapt to evolving technologies. FUJIFILM Medical Systems USA is headquartered in Stamford, CT. More information is available at www.fujimed.com.

(1) Synapse Managed Services are not available in all countries.

(C) 2008 FUJIFILM Medical Systems USA, Inc.