Beyond Burnout: How Mach7's New CEO Is Reshaping Enterprise Imaging From the Ground Up

There's a radiologist somewhere in your hospital who read X-rays this morning, then sat at a workstation and clicked. Then waited. Then clicked again. And again.

Not because the images are complex. Not because the case is challenging. But because the software is slow.

She loses five minutes. Her patients wait. The backlog grows. By the end of her shift, she's asked herself the same question a hundred times: Why does this have to be so hard?

This is the crisis Teri Thomas inherited when she became CEO of Mach7 Technologies last spring, and it's the thing that keeps her awake at night—not because it's unusual, but because it's everywhere.

"We've become complacent," she told us in a recent conversation with Imaging Wire. "There's a real failure in medical imaging. When imaging data can't be accessed, when it's slow, when there are workflow problems—we're taking time out of patients' lives. And that's unacceptable."

The Architect Who Built for Patients

Thomas comes to Mach7 by way of Epic and Vulpara, a career arc that has left her convinced of one thing: healthcare technology is a proxy for caring. A registered nurse by training, she spent 20 years at Epic watching how good EHR design could empower patients. Then she led Vulpara, the breast-imaging platform, where her north star was clear—save families from cancer.

Moving to Mach7 felt like stepping onto a much bigger stage. Suddenly she wasn't optimizing for one modality or one patient population. She was looking at the full spectrum: radiology, breast, orthopedics, veterinary medicine, endoscopy, pathology. And most importantly, she was looking at how all that imaging—scattered across half a dozen vendors, stored in proprietary archives, inaccessible outside a clinical workstation—was failing to serve the full patient picture.

"When I took the role," she said, "I called customers. I asked them what they liked about our technology and where we could improve. And I called every single Mach7 employee. I had some very long days."

The feedback was consistent. Both customers and staff said the same thing: break down silos. Empower people to do the right thing for the customer.

The Organizational Insight That Changes Everything

That insight became the blueprint for her first move: a fundamental restructuring of how Mach7 engages with customers.

In the old model, services and support reported up through different channels. Customers lived in a ticketing system. Each ticket was a transaction. The relationship began and ended with the ticket number.

Thomas scrapped it entirely.

She merged 16 distinct job descriptions into seven. She created a unified team called the Flight Crew—a deliberate nod to Mach7's namesake and mission around speed. Every part of the company that touches a customer is now organized around one principle: get to know them.

Each customer gets a designated team with a clear hierarchy. The ACE—Advocate for Customer Excellence—leads. They're joined by Wingmates (who guide customers through upgrades and ongoing support), Code Pilots (technical support), and Tech Vipers (deeply experienced engineers). It's a multidisciplinary crew, organized around the customer's needs, not the company's org chart.

But here's the radical part: every member of Mach7's leadership team—the CFO, the workforce excellence leader, the head of IT—now owns at least one customer relationship. They speak quarterly. Not to oversee the Account Executive. But to make sure every decision the company makes is made with a real customer in mind.

"I want them to know not just the names of the customers," Thomas said, "but the names of their kids, and the names of their kids' pets."

It sounds like a culture thing. It reads like a people-first company. But it's actually a strategy for better product decisions. Thomas borrowed the practice from Epic: the developers who write code now go watch customers use it. They spend four to six hours observing a radiologist read X-rays, manage worklists, navigate clinical workflows. Not to critique. Just to watch.

"If someone says 'this workflow is challenging, I have to scroll here and click there,' you can imagine it's a problem," she explained. "But if you watch someone do that four hundred times in a day, you understand it is a big deal."

The Four Problems Keeping Customers Awake

Those conversations—the ones in the conference room and the ones in the clinic—have surfaced four problems that define the market right now.

Burnout. The radiologist clicking and waiting isn't an edge case. She's the rule. When software is slow or unreliable or has broken workflows, she thinks about it. She's frustrated. And that frustration is a direct line to recruitment and retention. "I was speaking with a prospect," Thomas said, "and he laid out the cycle: read, call it, wait. Read, call it, wait. He told me directly—this is affecting our ability to hire and retain radiologists."

Staffing shortages. "There's only one place I've heard that people said they have plenty of staff, and that's the Netherlands," Thomas said wryly. "I don't know why." But everywhere else, the shortage is compounded by burnout. Radiology techs, PACS administrators, IT staff—all stretched. The push is to do more with less and to use AI—not just diagnostic AI, but workflow AI—to amplify the work of the people you have.

Cybersecurity terror. "It's not a matter of if we'll get a cyber attack," she noted. "It's a matter of when." Healthcare organizations are rightfully terrified. They're asking vendors harder questions: What if we have to lock down our network? Can we still access our images?

Fragmentation of the patient picture. Even with modern EHRs, imaging is still scattered. A patient's radiology studies might be in one system, her breast imaging in another, her pathology somewhere else. "We should be able to do better," Thomas said. "Imaging lags behind the rest of healthcare."

The Architecture That Frees the Data

This is where Mach7's core mission—vendor-neutral architecture for imaging—becomes not just a technical story but a patient story.

Mach7 started, back in 2007, as a vendor-neutral archive. A repository. But Thomas sees it as something much larger: a technology layer that breaks organizations free from proprietary lock-in and enables them to control their own imaging destiny.

The viewer—called eUnity—is fast and intuitive. It's zero-footprint, meaning it runs in a web browser without installation. Most importantly, it works across imaging modalities—radiology, breast, pathology, ultrasound, endoscopy. And it doesn't care which PACS or which vendor's equipment stored the images in the first place.

"We make other vendors scared," Thomas said, "because when they've got the Mach7 VNA, they can swap other systems out at will. They know they've got that stable base where they have freedom to make changes."

That freedom matters. Academic medical centers and large health systems are building their own AI models. They're experimenting with teleradiology. They're federated across multiple vendors and multiple clouds. They need a foundation that doesn't tie them to one vendor's roadmap or one vendor's cloud strategy.

What's Next

At RSNA this fall, Mach7 is showcasing deepened capabilities. Advanced visualization. A partnership with Amazon Web Services for cloud-based imaging. And a push into digital pathology—a newer area where Mach7 is moving fast, having shown early work and gotten strong customer feedback.

But the real announcement is implicit: under Thomas's leadership, Mach7 is moving beyond being a vendor of a repository product. It's becoming the operating system for imaging—the stable layer beneath the complexity that lets hospitals, clinics, and academic centers focus on what matters: getting the right image to the right doctor at the right time.

"I want our software to be the software you don't even think about," Thomas said. "You forget about it. You read your images, see your patients, get your work done, and go home in time for dinner."

That's not a modest goal. In healthcare technology, being forgettable is the highest compliment you can receive. It means you've solved the problem so completely that the tool disappears and the work becomes frictionless.

For a radiologist standing in front of a workstation, clicking through her worklist without waiting, without frustration, without burnout—that's not just better software.

That's change.