June 17, 2026
Last week, our team joined the imaging informatics community in Pittsburgh for the SIIM 2026 Annual Meeting at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center. This year’s theme, “Building Bridges Across Imaging Informatics,” set the tone for three days of practical conversation about how health systems connect data, workflows, and specialties into something greater than the sum of its parts.
Interoperability took center stage
If one idea ran through the week, it was interoperability. A general session with the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology framed a connected, AI-enabled future as a national priority, and the education program echoed it, with tracks on bridging specialties through enterprise imaging and on breaking down the silos between radiology and pathology. The message was consistent. The future of imaging is connected, vendor-neutral, and built around the patient rather than the department.
That is the same conversation we came to have.
Beyond the Monolith
Our panel, “Beyond the Monolith: Integrating Pathology and Other Ologies into a Specialized Enterprise Imaging Strategy,” sat squarely in that theme. The discussion focused on a challenge many health systems are working through: how to support high-performance, specialty-specific workflows, including the large file sizes and specialized metadata that digital pathology requires, while still giving clinicians a consolidated, vendor-neutral view of the patient record.
The throughline was simple. Adopting the right tool for each specialty should not mean getting locked in when one department needs to evolve. Interoperability is what makes that possible.
The real value was in the conversations
Beyond the sessions, the most valuable part of the week was the time spent with the people doing this work every day. Many of our best conversations were not about buying more. They were about getting more from the imaging investments organizations have already made: enabling imaging across more of the enterprise, designing workflows around how each department actually operates, and tightening the connections between systems that were never built to talk to each other.
It was a useful reminder that continuous education is part of the value we deliver. New use cases, overlooked capabilities, and recent advancements often deliver more impact than a net-new purchase and keep teams aligned with where the technology is heading.
Pathology is moving to the center
One signal stood out above the rest. The interest in bringing pathology into a connected enterprise imaging strategy was real and growing. Across our conversations, teams were thinking hard about how to give pathology the same workflow attention radiology has long received: handling its larger data and specialized metadata, and giving it a place alongside other specialties in a single, vendor-neutral view of the patient.
That momentum was the story of our week. Pathology is no longer a separate conversation happening off to the side. It is becoming central to how health systems think about enterprise imaging, and the response we heard told us the field is ready to treat it that way.
It was not all sessions and booth conversations, either. One evening, the team headed to PNC Park to watch the Pittsburgh Pirates take on the Los Angeles Dodgers, and the home team delivered, storming back for an exciting 9-8 win. A good comeback has a way of energizing a room, and it was a fitting way to cap a week spent talking about building bridges in the Steel City.
SIIM closed with the theme of the people at the heart of this field, which matched our experience. Technology moves the work forward, but it is the community, the candid debate, and the shared problem-solving that make it matter. Thank you to everyone who joined our panel, stopped by to talk, and pushed the conversation forward. We are already looking forward to continuing it, all the way to the next chapter of enterprise imaging.