Kodak Canada officially opened its newest office today in Summerside, PEI. The waterfront office will initially house a research and development team of seven IT professionals working within Kodak's Health Imaging Division.
Norm Naumoff, President of Kodak Canada Inc., said he is pleased that, in setting up the Summerside office, Kodak is expanding upon an already strong relationship that the company has had with PEI for many years. "Kodak enjoys a great relationship with our PEI healthcare customers," said Naumoff. "Now we may have the opportunity to work with some of these customers, right here in PEI, to develop new products that will benefit them and healthcare providers around the world."
Bob Gollaher, Kodak Canada Inc.'s Vice President, Health Imaging, explained that the Summerside office is the Canadian research and development wing of a new business unit within Kodak's Health Imaging Division. The new unit is working toward integrating digital health imaging systems with computerized health information storage systems, which hospitals and other healthcare providers use to keep track of documents such as patient records and requests for procedures. Currently, the two kinds of systems must operate separately, often making it cumbersome to collect or transfer data for a particular patient or group of patients.
"The new PARIS business unit is an exciting amalgamation of Picture Archiving Communications Systems (PACS) and Radiology Information Systems (RIS) technologies," explained Gollaher. "The team in PEI will work with our other PARIS R&D offices to create new products aimed at making storage and retrieval of health images and information much more efficient and effective for both healthcare providers and their patients."
The Summerside group will work closely with Kodak researchers in California and Reykjavik, Iceland. Fred Prior, Eastman Kodak's VP of Research and Development, said that the new PEI office is ideally situated to work with both Europe and North America: "As the region of North America that is closest to Europe, locating in PEI gives us a distinct geographical advantage."
But even more critical to the decision to come to PEI, said Prior, was the fact that local health technology professionals were here and eager to work with the Kodak team. "PEI has a highly skilled workforce from which we were able to put together a great group for our R&D office here," said Prior. "That was really the biggest single factor in our decision to come to PEI."
Norm Naumoff said that providing a positive quality of life for employees is always an important consideration when setting up a new office, and that PEI has a lot to offer in that respect. "Kodak firmly believes that having employees who are satisfied with all areas of their lives makes them enjoy their work more and do an even better job with us," he said. "We see our office in PEI as a model for the future, where the corporation has recognized the advantage – not just for its employees, but in the end, for itself as well – in coming to where the employees want to be."
"In so many ways, it truly makes good business sense for us to be here in PEI," continued Naumoff. "We're looking forward to getting started here in Summerside – to working with our fine PEI team, and to contributing to the community in every way we can."
Kodak's Health Imaging Division develops, manufactures and markets products for the capture, processing, presentation, distribution and printing of health-related images. Kodak is a leading single-source provider for PACS, radiology information systems, computed radiography, digital radiography, teleradiology, laser imagers, distributed medical imagers and traditional x-ray films and equipment. Kodak's Health Imaging Division has annual revenues of more than $2 billion, and has been serving the needs of the healthcare industry for over 100 years.