Merge Healthcare Releases Proprietary Technologies for the Medical Software Development Community

“Unlocking the Vault” on a broad range of internal toolkits and libraries developed over the past two decades.

MILWAUKEE--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Merge Healthcare (NASDAQ: MRGE), a leading health IT solutions provider, today announced that it will make its extensive suite of internal technologies available to the general software development market. Merge’s OEM team has developed a sizeable array of proprietary software modules during its long history of imaging and connectivity application development. These technical features have, until now, been exclusively included within a variety of internal libraries and utilities, and thus not available for general use by other members of the development community.

“Our engineering team is constantly asked to meet significant technical challenges,” explains Peter Bascom, Senior Vice President of Product Development at Merge OEM. “As we solve these problems for specific applications, we can now retain and productize the solutions to help the broader development market. Our first entrée into this took a series of technologies in x-ray that solves image quality, dose measurement, image stitching, shutter removal, and quality control issues; and combined them into one toolkit called Cedara xPipe™. We released this specialty toolkit to speed development and improve the quality of console applications."

CPI, the largest independent supplier of radiographic and fluoroscopic x-ray generators, has used Cedara xPipe in the development of their Rad Vision™ console application. “This is our first successful software console development,” says Mike Boyle, Vice President of CPI Power Electronics Business. “Merge OEM was able to offer us solutions to the trickier image processing and image manipulation portions of the 'CPI RAD Vision' package. CPI was then able to quickly integrate the Merge OEM solutions to develop a fully integrated package including the interface to our generators. Our customers are now able to see the benefits of this leading edge technology.”

With a proven process for packaging and distributing SDKs through the MergeCOM-3™ product line (www.mergecom3.com), Merge has a mechanism for getting these technologies to other professional medical software developers, who can quickly use them in their own application development projects.

“This is truly like unlocking the candy store for imaging software developers,” says Justin Dearborn, CEO of Merge Healthcare. “Customers know we are the ones to ask about imaging’s more difficult technical problems, and they have been waiting for this access. Distributing these technologies to the larger community is worth the investment because it can raise the quality and speed of imaging application development overall.”

Merge already has a significant following for its MergeCOM-3™ DICOM toolkit, which provides the basic standards and libraries needed for medical imaging software development. In addition to Cedara xPipe, Merge has released a toolkit focused on tumor tracking, and looks forward to continuing to keep the technologies flowing from its proprietary “vault”. For more information on Merge OEM’s collection of toolkits, please contact us at www.merge.com/oem.

Merge Healthcare develops solutions that automate healthcare data and diagnostic workflow to enable a better electronic record of the patient experience, and to enhance product development for health IT, device and pharmaceutical companies. Merge products, ranging from standards-based development toolkits to sophisticated clinical applications, have been used by healthcare providers, vendors and researchers worldwide for over 20 years. Additional information can be found at www.merge.com.

The matters discussed in this news release may include forward-looking statements, which could involve a number of risks and uncertainties. When used in this press release, the words “will,” “believes,” “intends,” “anticipates,” “expects” and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements. Actual results could differ materially from those expressed in, or implied by, such forward-looking statements. Except as expressly required by the federal securities laws, the Company undertakes no obligation to update such factors or to publicly announce the results of any of the forward-looking statements.