NEW YORK — June 8, 2017 — Ambra Health, makers of the leading cloud-based, medical image management suite, today announced the company has won the prestigious Terasaki Medical Innovation Award from the National Kidney Registry. The Terasaki Medical Innovation Award is given to individuals or organizations that have invented, developed, or created breakthrough technologies in transplantation. The winner is chosen via electronic ballot from National Kidney Registry’s Medical Board comprised of prominent practitioners, researchers, and donors.

Ambra Health received the award for its electronic medical image exchange solution that optimizes the potential kidney donor review process as part of a joint collaboration with GE Healthcare, VasoHealthcare IT, and Rackspace. In near real time, CT imaging studies from donors are made available to surgeons so they can make quicker and better decisions on donor anatomy, dramatically lowering canceled match rates for multiple patients participating in living kidney donor chains, which saves surgeon time and even patient lives.

“For all of us at Ambra, our mission is to build better image management technology so that health care providers can more effectively do their jobs in delivering better patient care. We could not be prouder to see our work in action for the National Kidney Registry, reducing staff time and helping to effectively match prospective donors to save lives,” said Morris Panner, CEO of Ambra Health.

In order to complete a donor and recipient matching cycle, both the surgeon and radiologist need to see the kidney CT imaging for each donor in the chain before conducting transplant surgery. Prior to Ambra Health, transplant center coordinators had to ship CDs between transplant centers in order to share CT studies. This process of receiving imaging on CDs could often take 10 days, which meant that if an abnormality was detected in a donor’s kidney or anatomy late in the process, the entire transplant chain had to be cancelled.

With Ambra Health, imaging can now be uploaded online using the web upload tool. Once in the Ambra platform, imaging is then pushed into PACS in real-time and easily shared across transplant centers through secure web-based links. During the implementation, coordinators spent about three weeks uploading all historical imaging from CDs to Ambra. The switch has saved over 1,400 hours collectively of coordinator time per year, which allows them to focus on matching donors and recipients rather than struggling with cumbersome logistics like shipping out and burning CDs. Visit Ambra Health to read the entire case study.

“Ambra Health has become ‘the armored car’ of image transfer – securely moving them from donor hospital to transplant center,” said Joe Sinacore, Director of Education and Development at the National Kidney Registry. “If a recipient's donor is declined due to imaging abnormalities, it could be many months before we can find another matching opportunity. Ambra Health helps to avoid any imaging surprises that could delay critical care. Surgeons have been very pleased with how easy the technology is to use,” he added.

Ambra Health will be honored at the National Kidney Registry’s awards Gala on June 8 at Rockefeller Center in New York City.