Imaging Informatics

Imaging Is the Biggest Data Problem in Healthcare. Here Is the Field Guide.

Andrew Volkening September 1, 2026

1:53

Medical imaging is the largest data type in healthcare, and one of the least understood outside the reading room.

Enterprise imaging can account for up to roughly 90% of a health system's total storage, according to HealthTech Magazine, yet most of the people who depend on imaging systems every day have never been taught how they fit together.

That gap matters. A referring physician, a surgeon, an IT administrator, and a new engineer all interact with imaging, and most viewer users are not radiologists. When the people around imaging understand the standards and systems underneath it, projects move faster, integrations break less, and patients get the right image in front of the right clinician sooner.

So we wrote the map

Imaging Informatics 101: The Complete Guide explains the field from first principles, in language anyone in healthcare can follow. It is vendor-neutral by design. The goal is understanding, not a sales pitch.

Inside, you will find the foundations of the field, from what imaging informatics is to the five families of modalities and the workflow every study follows. You will get a clear explanation of the standards that hold it all together: DICOM, the language of medical images; DICOMweb, which brings imaging onto modern web technology; and how HL7, FHIR, and IHE choreograph everything around the images.

And you will get the systems view, covering PACS and vendor-neutral archives, diagnostic and clinical viewers, how pixels actually reach the screen, cloud imaging, security and privacy, and where artificial intelligence and regulation are taking the field next.

If you have ever wanted one clear reference that connects the dots across imaging, this is it.

Get the guide

Download Imaging Informatics 101: The Complete Guide. Free, no cost, just a quick form.

Andrew Volkening

Andrew Volkening has spent more than 25 years in healthcare imaging, moving from the hospital floor to product leadership. He began his career as a field service engineer at Agfa HealthCare, then spent several years as PACS Administrator at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, Canada's largest trauma center and one of the country's leading teaching and research hospitals. That operational grounding shapes how he works: he has held clinical solutions and product leadership roles on the vendor side ever since, and today is a product leader at Mach7 Technologies, focused on the clinical direction of enterprise imaging solutions used by health systems across North America. His research on lossy compression contributed to the development of Canadian national guidelines and earned recognition for its clinical rigor. Andrew works in the space between clinical reality and product decisions, and on making sure imaging strategy is driven by evidence from the field rather than assumptions.

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Whitepaper

Imaging Informatics 101: The Complete Guide

A plain-language field guide to how medical images are created, stored, moved, and shared across the health enterprise. Free download.