A FHIR-based radiology workflow connects imaging systems that don’t communicate. This gap grows costlier each year. Radiology exam volume grew 31% between Q1 2018 and Q1 2024. The radiologist workforce grew 24% over the same stretch. That’s the mismatch, straight from a Journal of the American College of Radiology analysis of 46.4 million exams. Meanwhile, the EHR, the PACS, and the RIS at most hospitals still run as three separate islands. A referring physician waits on a report that’s already finished. A technologist re-keys the same patient ID for the third time that morning. None of that is a staffing problem. It’s an interoperability problem. HL7’s Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standard is the fix: one standardized language for moving imaging data in real time. Radiology interoperability stops being an IT aspiration and becomes an operational requirement.
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