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AI and the Future of Imaging | Mach7 Technologies

teri@mach7t.com (Teri Thomas) — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 12:00:00 GMT

We are living in an unusually interesting moment. AI is changing how we work, how we think, and above all how fast an idea becomes something real in a clinician’s hands. For some people that pace is frightening. I understand why. But at Mach7 we see it differently: change is our oxygen.

The market largely agrees on the opportunity. In imaging specifically, roughly 79% of professionals say they see meaningful value in AI, yet only about 13% describe themselves as broad adopters — most are still piloting or evaluating (Philips, State of AI in Diagnostic Imaging). That gap between seeing the value and operationalizing it is exactly where the next few years will be won or lost.

Change is our oxygen

The older I get, the faster time seems to move, and the technology industry has never moved faster than it does right now. AI is changing everything: how we work, how we think, and the pace at which a good idea becomes delivered software. What felt impossible even two years ago is reality today.

I believe the winners of the future will be those who treat that pace not as something to fear, but as an opportunity. That is a choice, and it is one we have made deliberately. Mach7 is leaning into an AI-forward future in imaging.

The real question isn’t whether to adopt AI. It’s your AIQ.

AI changes more than tooling; it changes leadership and how you design an organization. The best way I can describe it is through a simple idea we use internally: AIQ, your organizational and individual intelligence for understanding and applying AI.

At Mach7 we have defined AIQ levels and set standards across every role, and we are actively upskilling the whole company. The goal is not novelty. It is better products, faster innovation, and finding failure points before they reach a customer. Just as important, relegating repetitive work to AI creates room for what is uniquely human: connecting with our customers as people. I believe AIQ is becoming the most valuable career skill there is, and we are building it into how we lead.

AI runs on data — so who controls yours?

Here is the practical problem for imaging leaders. As AI becomes a bigger consumer of imaging data, and as it drives the user experience more deeply, you need real access to your own data. If a vendor holds you hostage to it, the things that matter next simply are not possible: building foundation models, supporting clinical trials, and using imaging data for purposes it was never used for before.

This is not a fringe concern. The vendor neutral archive and PACS market sat at about $5.1 billion in 2025 and is forecast to grow at roughly 9.2% a year to about $7.9 billion by 2030, driven largely by escalating imaging data volumes and the demand for data portability (MarketsandMarkets). Meanwhile the AI-in-medical-imaging market is expanding far faster — near 35% annually through the early 2030s (Grand View Research). The data layer has to keep up.

Vendor neutrality is our heritage. We are open, interoperable, and flexible by design, which means your data stays yours and stays usable. That is the difference between reacting to change and getting ahead of it.

We’re not changing who we are. We’re changing how.

Let me be clear about what is changing and what is not. We do not have to reinvent who we are. Mach7 is built on a strong foundation: vendor neutrality, scale to very large volumes, open and interoperable by default. That foundation is solid, and it stays.

What we are changing is how we show up: AI-enabled, faster, and more personal, with designated teams that get to know our customers and partner with them. It all comes back to the data and the metadata, orchestrated so it is genuinely useful across every type of imaging data our customers hold. In the end, we are building toward a smart data ecosystem. We are not changing the who. We are changing the how, in an industry with almost limitless possibility.

Getting ready to take off

You may not know Mach7 yet. I think you will hear our name more and more, because we intend to help define the future of imaging data rather than catch up to it. We have already started telling that story publicly, including the thinking behind our Flamingo naming, and there is more to come as we plan what is ahead.

If your world is changing quickly, and it is, look for a vendor that is getting ahead of it on your behalf. We would like to be that partner. Get to know us.

Talk to us

Talk to Mach7 about data independence and an AI-forward imaging strategy. And follow Mach7 on LinkedIn for the next chapters of this story.

Forward-looking statements: This article contains forward-looking statements about Mach7 Technologies’ plans, products, strategy, and future performance. These statements reflect current expectations as at the date of publication and involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties. Actual outcomes may differ materially. Mach7 Technologies undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statement except as required by law. Nothing in this article is intended as financial product advice.

Five Common Enterprise Image Viewer Issues | Mach7

marketing@mach7t.com (Mach7 Team) — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Most of the issues that slow a diagnostic image viewer down are predictable, and most are preventable. Across the imaging teams we work with, the same handful of themes come up again and again, and almost none of them are really about the viewer itself. They are about the environment around it: certificates, configuration, versions, and the connections between systems.

Here are the five that generate the most questions, and the practical habits that keep each one from turning into downtime.

1. Certificates and secure access

Expired security certificates are one of the leading reasons users suddenly cannot log in or open studies, and they tend to expire at the worst possible hour. The good news is that this is entirely predictable, which means it is entirely preventable.

Keep an inventory of your certificates and their expiry dates, renew about 30 days ahead rather than waiting for the deadline, and re-test login and image retrieval right after any renewal. A simple habit that works well: set calendar reminders at 60, 30, and 7 days before every certificate expires, and loop your vendor in early so a replacement certificate can be prepared in the right format ahead of time.

2. Smooth study and image viewing

When viewing feels slow, or a study does not hang the way a reader expects, the cause usually traces back to hanging protocols, display configuration, a missing DICOM object, or an unusually large study, rather than the viewer itself.

Validate hanging protocols for each modality you use, re-check configuration whenever layouts or DICOM sources change, and confirm behavior on a few representative large studies. Keeping a small set of known-good test studies makes it quick to validate after any change. One frequent and easily fixed cause of slowness: when a new modality comes online, compression settings sometimes get missed, which sends uncompressed data across the network for no clinical reason. A quick configuration check catches it.

3. Getting more from the tools you already have

A large share of the questions imaging teams raise are really “how do I” questions. In many cases, the capability is already in the viewer. It just needs to be set up. Measurement calibration, saved preferences, shortcuts, and hanging protocols are all quick wins that make a real difference day to day.

Learn the quick wins, save and share a standard preference profile so new users start from a strong baseline, and run a short refresher whenever you onboard new staff. If you find yourself wishing your viewer did something, ask your vendor. There is a good chance it already does.

4. Staying current

Upgrades deliver fixes, performance gains, and security improvements. Running an older version can mean living with an issue that a newer release already solved.

Review the release notes so you know what each version changes, always test in a non-production environment first, and schedule upgrade windows on your terms rather than waiting for a problem to force one. The safest path is a regular, planned cadence: test environment, mock upgrade, a thorough safe-testing plan, then a well-communicated production upgrade. If you are unsure what has changed since your current version, ask your vendor to walk you through it before you plan the move.

5. Integrations: Epic, PACS, and SSO

Many issues that look like a viewer problem are actually an upstream change to an endpoint, a URL, or a certificate somewhere else in the environment. Re-validate launches after any endpoint, URL, or certificate change, keep a test integration path you can check safely, and coordinate changes with your integration partners in advance.

The single most useful habit here: change one thing at a time, then validate. It makes any issue far easier to trace. An integration validation checklist tailored to your environment gives everyone a shared map of what is connected.

A few habits that prevent most of it

Track certificate expiry dates and renew early.
Keep a set of known-good test studies for quick validation.
Save and share preference and hanging-protocol profiles.
Stay on a current, supported version, and review release notes.
Re-validate integrations after any endpoint change.

None of these are complicated. They just reward a little planning over waiting for something to break.

This guidance comes from the Mach7 Customer Success team. We run monthly Office Hours for our customers to share practical tips like these and answer live questions. If you would like to talk through any of the habits above, reach out to your account team or contact us at events@mach7t.com.

eUnity is a diagnostic viewer intended to display medical images and associated clinical reports to aid in diagnosis by trained healthcare professionals. Professional and prescription use only. In the United States only, eUnity supports digital pathology whole-slide imaging (WSI) for reference and referral use and is not intended for primary diagnosis. Mammography and digital breast tomosynthesis are not intended for diagnostic interpretation on mobile devices.

Why a Flamingo? The Thinking Behind the Name | Mach7

teri@mach7t.com (Teri Thomas) — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 12:00:00 GMT

People often ask why we chose the name Flamingo for our newest products. As a name, it is certainly unexpected. Most enterprise software is named after technical concepts, tech word mixes, or powerful-sounding acronyms. We wanted a name people would remember, but more importantly, one that represented what we’re trying to build.

Flamingos thrive in complex environments. They adapt. They migrate. They work as a flock rather than as isolated individuals. They are remarkably balanced, resilient, and efficient. Those qualities align closely with what we want our technology to be.

Healthcare is becoming more complex every year. Images come from countless devices, data lives across dozens of systems, AI is advancing at extraordinary speed, and customers increasingly expect openness rather than lock-in. The future isn’t about replacing everything. It’s about orchestrating everything.

That’s what Flamingo represents.

A flock, not a single product

Rather than a single product, Flamingo is a flock: a collection of intelligent capabilities that work independently but become significantly more powerful together. Like a flock, each component has its own purpose, yet the real strength comes from how they move together.

The balance healthcare needs

I also love the symbolism of balance. A flamingo standing effortlessly on one leg is one of nature’s great feats of engineering. Our version of balance is building software that is innovative without sacrificing reliability, intelligent without losing transparency, and open without compromising security. Healthcare needs all of those things at the same time.

Built to adapt

Perhaps my favorite characteristic is adaptability. Flamingos don’t survive because they’re the biggest or the strongest. They survive because they evolve with their environment. Technology companies face the same challenge. We can’t build products that solve yesterday’s problems. We have to build systems that are ready for whatever healthcare looks like in five or ten years.

There’s another lesson as well. Flamingos are known for their color, but they aren’t born that way. Their environment shapes them over time. I think companies are much the same. Our culture, our reputation, and ultimately our brand aren’t created by a marketing department. They’re built one customer interaction, one release, one decision, and one kept promise at a time.

Finally, Flamingo reminds us that extraordinary things happen when individuals work together toward a common purpose. Great healthcare technology isn’t created by one engineer, one salesperson, one product manager, or one CEO. It’s built by talented people with different skills moving in the same direction.

Designed for what’s next

In the years ahead, AI will reshape healthcare. Interoperability will become the expectation rather than the exception. Data will matter more than the applications that created it. Flamingo is how we embrace that future: open, intelligent, adaptable, beautifully orchestrated, and designed to evolve.

A flamingo is distinctive not because it’s loud, but because it’s unmistakable. That’s the aspiration for our technology as well: not simply to build another product, but to create something customers instantly recognize for its elegance, capability, and impact.

Flamingo is how Mach7 is building for an open, intelligent future in enterprise imaging. Follow along as we share more in the months ahead.

Building Bridges at SIIM 2026 | Mach7 Technologies

marketing@mach7t.com (Mach7 Team) — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 12:00:00 GMT

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.

Why enterprise imaging needs flexibility, not lock-in | Mach7

marketing@mach7t.com (Mach7 Team) — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Teri Thomas and Barinder Dhillon join The Imaging Wire’s Brian Casey on why imaging is moving past standardized workflows, and what flexibility actually requires.

About the conversation

Recorded ahead of the SIIM Annual Meeting 2026, this episode of The Imaging Wire Show brings together host Brian Casey, Mach7 CEO Teri Thomas, and Barinder Dhillon for about 22 minutes on how enterprise imaging is evolving beyond traditional PACS and standardized workflows.

What they cover

Why healthcare organizations are prioritizing flexibility and interoperability
The growing importance of vendor-neutral strategies
The operational realities of modern imaging workflows
AI’s role in enterprise imaging and workflow orchestration
How organizations can modernize without creating disruption
The future of imaging data, cloud strategies, and intelligent workflow design

Why the question keeps coming up

Imaging environments keep getting broader. A single organization may now span radiology, cardiology, digital pathology, AI applications and care teams spread across sites, and each addition puts pressure on an architecture that was designed around one department. The recurring problem is not any individual system but how they connect, and how much freedom an organization keeps to change its mind later.

That is the thread running through this conversation: connecting systems intelligently while protecting workflow efficiency and clinical performance, and doing it without a rip-and-replace project.

CEO Leadership: Burnout, Staffing, and Transformation in Imaging | Mach7

marketing@mach7t.com (Mach7 Team) — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 12:00:00 GMT

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.