Most of what enterprise imaging returns arrives after go-live, not at it.
Almost any facility has departmental systems that were never integrated into the wider enterprise. The consequence shows up at three in the morning, when an ED physician cannot pull a prior CT held in another department's PACS and orders the study again. Health systems that treat enterprise imaging as a single project stop looking for the uses that only appear in years two through five, such as retiring a second PACS contract or image-enabling a new service line.
This paper treats enterprise imaging as a multi-year program and shows what to sequence first. It covers what separates a real VNA from a rebranded PACS archive, where the cost savings actually come from, and the five decisions a strategy has to settle in advance, from consolidating silos to standardizing on a single zero-footprint viewer. It also sets out what to ask a vendor about a ten-year contract.