What is the Future for Enterprise Imaging?

KLAS recently hosted a Keystone Summit for enterprise imaging. Earlier in the year we discussed what the topic of our Keystone Summit should be, with several obvious big topics lined up. In the eleventh hour, two of my colleagues, Monique Rasband and Coray Tate, energetically presented a solid case that enterprise imaging should be the man of the hour, so to speak.

And so, we shifted gears and began to prep for a conference that brought some of the great imaging minds together. Participants braved the higher altitudes to gather on the slopes of Snowbird Resort outside of Salt Lake City. During our day-long summit, punctuated by breakout sessions and discussion panels, our attendees tackled the biggest issues facing the widespread adoption of enterprise imaging.

For many of our attendees, advocating for enterprise imaging felt like second-nature, they’ve been doing it for so long. This has passed beyond a “job requirement” and into a passion for many. It was wonderful to watch these passionate individuals discuss their ideas and solutions on how to make their vision a reality.

As I watched the proceedings unfold, these are a few of the thoughts that came to my mind:

Providers need vendor partners that are passionate about a successful solution, avoiding ithe pressure of sales and marketing to the point that they proclaim they have tamed the Enterprise Imaging beast. A common concern was that too often, solutions are created to be sold, rather than successfully used. It’s too common for vendors to overstate the expectation for their solutions versus what is actually sold. It did not go unnoticed that one vendor referred to their solution as the complete answer to the provider’s needs, especially when clients of the vendor had a different opinion. As one of our advisory board members, Rasu Shrestha expressed; providers often aren’t looking to buy a tool, as much as they want to buy partnerships and successful outcomes.

It was apparent from provider sentiment that major confusion exists within many provider organizations as to how Enterprise Imaging could/would work, who would benefit, who needed to be involved in governance and how everyone should work together. Many expressed frustrations at the lack of buy-in from their executive teams – including a lack of understanding as to the resources, time and effort that would be required to successfully implement a full enterprise imaging solution. This lack of unity in the provider world makes the solution much more complex for vendors to deliver.

I was excited to see during open discussion at the tables that the enterprise imaging goals of vendors and providers are more closely aligned than I had initially thought.

A provider organization that partners with or marries a vendor expects the vendor to be the expert down the road to success and seriously needs the vendor to step into that role and guide the provider organization. As the expert, the vendor can and should be the leader to success. There is no room for the vendor to allow the ignorance or lack of experience from the provider to result in failure.

The end result of this summit was a white paper which KLAS has publicly shared as we continue to work towards improving the success of enterprise imaging deployment and adoption.