Pharmaceutical giant Bayer has teamed up with software group Alara Imaging in a bid to help standardize radiation doses used in computed tomography (CT) scans.
The two companies will integrate Alara's dose tools with Bayer's Calantic digital solution platform. Calantic is a vendor-neutral cloud-based marketplace of AI-enabled radiology apps aimed at automating routine radiology tasks.
The move comes amid concerns over the wide differences in patient radiation doses in such scans, both in the U.S. and across the world.
Such potentially high doses present a “modifiable health risk” as hospitals and other healthcare institutions can improve their operations through feedback and monitoring, according to a 2020 JAMA research paper.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has established a standardized method to monitor and potentially discourage high CT radiation doses through the formation of new patient safety and quality control measures, so-called electronic clinical quality measures, or eCQMs. These eCQMS use Alara software to help analyze the clinical data involved.
“Bayer is committed to helping Radimetrics customers by engaging with Alara to support their institutions compliance with the new Hospital Quality Reporting eCQMs by leveraging the Alara gateway,” said Rich Dewit, Bayer’s global head, digital solutions.
As CMS measure steward, Menlo Park, California-based Alara supports healthcare systems in securely transferring data from existing medical health records systems, radiology information systems and picture archiving and communication systems and enabling the computations necessary to ensure CMS quality measure compliance.
“Alara is proud to collaborate with Bayer to support health systems across the U.S. with these important patient safety measures,” said Nate Mazonson, CEO and co-founder of Alara.
In June, Bayer unveiled a collaboration with Rad AI to bring its generative AI radiology reporting solutions and patient follow-up management tech to the pharma giant's Calantic digital solution customers.
The company also recently announced a partnership with Google for its cloud and AI capabilities to build new tech products to assist radiologists. Bayer wants to pair its radiology, healthcare regulator and clinical data handling expertise with Google's tech muscle and ongoing work in generative AI to speed up innovation in medical imaging, according to the companies.
Bayer employed almost 100,000 people as of fiscal 2022 with sales of 50.7 billion euros.