Going Against the Status Quo: From Assembly Line Reads to a Personalized Practice
Radiology is at the center of modern healthcare. It guides diagnoses, shapes treatment plans, and influences patient outcomes across nearly every specialty. Yet the imaging tech stack remains fossilized in time. On-premise PACS platforms were designed long before cloud computing, AI, and, well, even the modern Internet.
Systems have been pieced together haphazardly over the years to keep up with advancements in technology. Reporting tools and AI features are often siloed, with numerous integration layers, and imaging is delivered without context. The result? Radiologists are often tethered to their workstations and frustrated by the data silos that limit clinical insights and hinder their ability to utilize new AI tools.
This doesn’t just make radiology a less-than-appealing medical specialty; it’s a crisis in our healthcare system. A study in Academic Radiology found that diagnostic discrepancies increased by 44% when prior imaging wasn’t available. In the ED, missing priors led to 20% repeat imaging — wasted time, wasted money, and delayed care.
Backlogs swell, diagnostic delays increase, incidental findings are lost in the patient journey, and an increasing number of radiologists feel frustrated. Just this month, Anderson Hospital in Maryville, IL, had to close most of its outpatient radiology services, including at least four imaging centers for one week, citing a shortage of radiologists and radiology technologists. Why are our modern radiology solutions still failing physicians, health systems, and ultimately, patients?
Why “Modern” Solutions Still Fail
Prominent vendors continue to offer the same playbook: a new PACS version, a “cloud” archive, and another AI integration. However, these are surface-level fixes on a broken foundation and not cloud-native at all. Every tool is separate, and IT teams are left duct-taping systems together, with radiologists having to click between them.
The result? Burnout remains high, with 54% of radiologists reporting they feel burned out, and nearly half citing inefficient workflows and legacy software as the primary causes.
Modernizing this ecosystem requires more than APIs or cloud add-ons; it demands rebuilding the entire platform from the ground up. That task is lengthy, costly, and technically daunting. Most vendors and their customers are simply not equipped to undertake it.
Sirona’s Radical Rebuild
Sirona has re-engineered the imaging stack from the ground up for the way radiology should work: a unified platform that is context-rich, personalized, and connected. This required five years, nearly $100 million of R&D, and many talented individuals to build an incredible combination of modern software and cloud-native infrastructure.
RadOS™ is the only fully cloud-based operating system for diagnostic imaging. It’s radiology’s first cloud native platform, meaning it was built from the ground up specifically for the cloud. Sirona is 100% cloud-native on Amazon Web Services; there are no on-premise servers, colocation racks, cloud storage bolt-ons, or thin clients disguised as the cloud.
Sirona’s RadOS™ platform understands how a radiology practice operates daily. It begins by unifying all the data and tools needed for physicians to access information seamlessly from anywhere at any time. The unique architecture and AI capabilities can automate 90% of the clicks, drags, scrolls, and “scratch that” moments, slowing radiologists down.
RadOS™ ties together all the clinical data feeds practices need (DICOM, HL7, speech-to-text, & more), with all the workflow software required to care for patients (reporter, PACS, viewer, & worklist). At its core, RadOS™ normalizes and structures data to power a suite of patented, AI-driven technologies. These technologies include pixel-to-report, ontology classification, and our radiology-specific LLM engine, SironaLex.
RadOS™ is built on the same principles as all modern software today, utilizing a microservices-based architecture. Think of this like Legos; it’s a bunch of independent pieces that’re all tied together in a standardized way. Anytime a piece of the platform needs to be modernized or a new capability needs to be added, a module can be swapped out just like Lego pieces (and you don’t have to worry about anything breaking).
How This Transforms Radiology
By layering prior imaging, longitudinal history, and real-time clinical data into a single platform, Sirona enables radiologists to deliver truly personalized reads without slowing down. The system remembers their display preferences for every study type, surfaces priors automatically, and offers seamless remote reading.
And when it comes to reporting, Sirona Reporting was built with the full power of the RadOS™ platform, giving it access to pixels, a unified event space, Sirona’s platform AI capabilities, and more. It’s not a new product; it’s a whole new paradigm in reporting, and the only reporter in the market held to medical device regulation processes and discipline.
This enables Sirona to deliver advanced AI capabilities safely, securely, and legally, a capability that no one else in the market can match.
Practices have used Sirona to transform their workflows. Eastern Radiological Associates (ERA) utilized Sirona to unify four disparate IT systems (PACS, RIS, Reporting, and Worklist), increase clinical efficiency by up to 25%, and enhance operational and staffing efficiency. This allows the practice to easily collaborate with other facilities to cover surge volumes as well.
Breaking Free from the Status Quo
Radiology doesn’t need another patch; it requires a platform that provides radiologists with a comprehensive patient picture, streamlines their workflow, and frees them from the confines of the reading room.
That’s what Sirona delivers as a complete reimagining of how diagnostic imaging works. Are you ready to start fresh with the only platform built for the personalized, context-rich radiology future? Learn more about how Sirona is really changing the status quo in our new whitepaper.