Enterprise Imaging Vendor Neutral Archive Interoperability

Building Bridges at SIIM 2026

Mach7 Team June 17, 2026

Building Bridges at SIIM 2026 | Mach7 Technologies

4:07

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," ran through three days of sessions on connecting imaging data across departments.

Interoperability dominated the program

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 the silos between radiology and pathology. Speakers agreed on one point: imaging systems should be organized around the patient record, not around a single department's PACS.

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 problem many health systems are working through: how to support specialty-specific workflows, including the large file sizes and specialized metadata that digital pathology requires, while still giving clinicians one consolidated, vendor-neutral view of the patient record.

A hospital should be able to replace its pathology system without touching radiology. That requires the images to live outside either application.

What customers actually asked us

Beyond the sessions, the most useful part of the week was time with the people doing this work every day. Most of them asked how to get more out of systems they already own: extending imaging to more of the enterprise, designing workflows around how each department actually operates, and connecting systems that were never built to exchange data.

We took that as a signal that our training program should cover existing features more often, not just new releases. Turning on something a customer already licenses is usually faster and cheaper than buying another system.

Pathology is moving to the center

Pathology came up in nearly every conversation. Teams were thinking hard about how to give it the same workflow attention radiology has long received: handling its larger files and specialized metadata, and giving it a place alongside other specialties in a single, vendor-neutral view of the patient. Health systems are now scoping pathology into the same archive project as radiology, rather than treating it as a separate program to get to later. If that is where you are, our paper on enterprise imaging strategy beyond radiology covers the sequencing.

It was not all sessions and booth conversations. One evening the team headed to PNC Park to watch the Pittsburgh Pirates take on the Los Angeles Dodgers, and the home team stormed back for a 9-8 win.

SIIM closed on the theme of the people at the heart of this field, which matched our experience: the best part was arguing about this in person with the people who run these systems. Thank you to everyone who joined our panel and stopped by to talk. We will be back at SIIM 2027.