The Part of the Reporting Migration That’s Easy to Overlook

Every radiology practice navigating the PowerScribe® 360 end-of-life will spend significant time on the technical questions, like which platform should we use, what integrations are needed and what the infrastructure should look like. 

Those questions absolutely matter, but according to Lisa Soltz, Vice President of Implementations at Rad AI — who has guided organizations through some of the most complex reporting platform transitions in the industry — they're not where implementations commonly fail. Many implementations fail on the human side.

An Underestimated Variable

Radiologists who have used the same platform for a decade aren't just switching software. They've built an entire professional rhythm around a specific tool — the way they dictate, the commands they use without thinking and the templates they've refined over years of practice. Asking them to change all of that, on a tight timeline while managing an ever-growing workload, is a significant ask.

The organizations that handle this well don't pretend the change management friction doesn't exist. They plan for it — earlier than feels necessary and more deliberately than an IT project typically requires.

What Early Looks Like in Practice

One of Soltz’s most consistent observations across implementations is that the pain points organizations encounter at go-live were almost always visible months earlier, but they weren't surfaced. Third-party integration vendors (RIS, PACS, worklist) have their own timelines, their own scoping requirements and their own professional services queues. They aren’t on your schedule by default. Organizations that treat those conversations as a go-live dependency rather than a preproject requirement routinely find themselves blocked at the worst possible moment.

The same principle applies internally. IT leads, admin teams and radiologist stakeholders all need their bandwidth protected. If the right people aren't at the table with dedicated time, the quality of the product and the implementation partner become secondary.

The Radiologist Champion Question

This isn't a ceremonial role. The radiologist champion bridges IT and the reading room, translates technical decisions into clinical language, surfaces concerns before they morph into resistance and gives skeptical colleagues a trusted voice rather than a vendor pitch. Finding this person — and giving them the time and authority to actually play the role — is one of the highest-leverage decisions an organization makes before a project begins.

Go-Live Isn't the Finish Line

Perhaps the most important reframe Soltz offered: Go-live is a milestone, not a destination. The period immediately following is where adoption is won or lost — where users decide whether to lean into the new platform or quietly revert to old habits. Organizations that treat go-live as the end of the project rather than the beginning of the adoption curve consistently underinvest in the moment that matters most.

The good news: This is entirely plannable, and the right partner can help guide you through the process from pre-planning to post-launch. 

Soltz’s full comments — including her framework for implementation timelines, the recurring pain points she sees across organizations of every size and the Q&A that followed — is part of a broader panel conversation available in this on-demand webinar.