The Cloud-Native Path to Profitable Radiology
Radiology has spent years adding tools, tabs, and AI widgets to an already fragmented workflow. Yet none of those additions solved the underlying problem: the system itself wasn’t built for the way modern radiologists work. In a recent webinar, Sirona founder Cameron Andrews joined practicing radiologists Dr. Luke Roller and Dr. Jon Masur to discuss why a cloud-native radiology operating system can change what’s possible for practices of every size.
Their conversation made one thing clear: radiology doesn’t need more add-ons; it requires a unified, cloud-native operating system.
AI Is the Lightbulb, and Cloud-Native Infrastructure Is the Grid
Cameron opened the webinar with an analogy that grounded the entire discussion: “AI is the lightbulb in this moment, but the real revolution is the power grid beneath it.” Radiology has witnessed significant advancements in PACS performance, voice recognition, universal worklists, and specialized AI. However, because these advancements evolved in separate silos, the ceiling on innovation remained the same. Each new tool required yet another integration, another login, another place to click. “We perfected viewing, voice, and orchestration—but never the system. The ceiling isn’t performance; it’s architecture,” said Cameron. A cloud-native platform changes that dynamic. Instead of stitching tools together, it creates a unified environment, rather than a patchwork of tools. This is the “electric grid,” as Cameron put it, that radiologists have been waiting for to really put AI tools to work.
When Fragmentation Becomes a Business Problem
Radiology groups today juggle multiple PACS and RIS instances, workstation installations, custom integrations, and go-lives that span months or years. Each new site or partner introduces new layers of complexity. Health systems, meanwhile, face the opposite challenge. They desperately need additional reading capacity, but struggle to onboard external groups because their fragmented infrastructure creates an unacceptable security risk.
The consequences are predictable: backlogs grow, costs rise, and patients wait longer for care. AI, despite the promise, cannot meaningfully transform radiology until the infrastructure it runs on is rebuilt. Dr. Masur said, “Radiology has as much of an integration problem as a technology problem. The moment you unify PACS, reporting, and workflow, half the complexity evaporates. Practices don’t struggle because the tools are bad—they struggle because the tools don’t talk to each other.”
A New Model Emerges
As the panelists shared their experiences, the advantages of a unified, cloud-native operating system became increasingly clear. Dr. Luke Roller shared the journey of his practice, which, over the last three years, has become a case study in what modern radiology can look like. In 2021, Dr. Roller was a solo radiologist in the Midwest, determined to serve rural and underserved communities. The need was clear, but the barriers seemed insurmountable. Traditional vendors demanded heavy upfront capital, proprietary workstations, complex installations, and lengthy implementation timelines. Launching and scaling a practice under that model felt impossible. When he partnered with Sirona in 2022, the paradigm shifted. With nothing more than a browser, he went live within weeks, reading around 50 studies a month for small, overlooked sites, such as a regional prison and a rural outpatient clinic. For the first time, technology wasn’t a barrier, and over the following year, volume grew steadily. Through Sirona’s network, he connected with another teleradiology group to share overnight work. This collaboration required no special hardware, no new integrations, and no IT overhead.
The economic benefits became apparent as well. A true cloud-native platform like that of Sirona converts fixed capital and infrastructure costs into a simple operating model. Practices simply pay for what they use and can scale seamlessly with demand. For example, for Dr. Roller, his startup costs were radically lower because the platform was run right on his browser. There were no workstations to purchase or ship, no servers to install, no VPN tunnels to maintain. Instead of spending tens of thousands of dollars before reading his first case, he could focus entirely on clinical work and growing sustainably. As Dr. Roller put it during the webinar, “The fixed costs were so low that my practice could actually breathe.”
The Security Problem No One Talks About
Dr. Masur highlighted a critical but often overlooked point: large health systems are hesitant to outsource due to concerns about quality; they also hesitate because of security and operational overhead. Dr. Roller then shared that Sirona introduced him to a significant health system that was buckling under the pressure of an enormous imaging backlog. The partnership that would have been unthinkable on legacy infrastructure became not only possible but fast because of Sirona handling of integrations, security reviews, compliance questionnaires, and credentialing logistics.
Cloud-native architecture consolidates governance and eliminates the need for dedicated workstations, site-specific VPNs, and brittle integrations. Instead of multiplying risk, the system centralizes it. For health systems, this means they can finally expand capacity without expanding vulnerability.
Productivity Comes From Unity, Not Speed Alone
One of the most striking themes of the conversation was the reframing of productivity. The industry has long focused on shaving seconds from clicks or automating isolated tasks. However, the panelists emphasized that the real productivity gains come from eliminating fragmentation. For example, Sirona Reporting is built with the full power of RadOS™ – giving it access to pixels, platform-level AI, and more. It’s a whole new paradigm in reporting that automatically connects image interactions to structured report content. Prior images surface instantly, without hunting or guessing, while AI assistance unfolds in the background and is actually contextual. As Dr. Masur put it: “Everyone talks about speed. But the real gains come from eliminating fragmentation. When everything speaks the same language, you don’t need to ‘go faster.’ You just stop slowing down.”
A Foundation for the Future
What emerged from this conversation wasn’t a story about features or upgrades—it was a story about reclaiming possibility. Cloud-native architecture doesn’t simply improve how radiologists work; it reshapes how practices grow, how partnerships form, and how patients receive care.
Private practices gain the ability to launch and scale without absorbing crushing IT overhead. Health systems gain a modern pathway to expand reading capacity without increasing risk.
And radiologists gain a workspace aligned with their thinking. As Cameron concluded: “If we can make radiology work for individual physicians, we can help the largest health systems, too. The future is unified, cloud-native, and radically simpler.”
Access the webinar: