Imaging Informatics 101: The Complete Guide

The vendor-neutral field guide to how medical images are created, stored, moved, displayed, and shared across the modern health enterprise.

Written for everyone who touches imaging, not just radiologists

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.

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.

This 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.

What you’ll learn

• The five families of imaging modalities, and what each one means for software
• DICOM and DICOMweb explained from first principles
• How HL7, FHIR, and IHE connect orders, results, and identity
• PACS, VNA, and the viewing layer, and how pixels reach the screen
• Cloud imaging, security and privacy, and image exchange
• Where AI and medical-device regulation are taking the field
• A one-page glossary of every acronym you will hear in week one