How a fully managed cloud-native PACS transformed a rural hospital

McKenzie Memorial Hospital, a critical-access facility in Michigan with only 2.5 IT FTEs across 13 locations, struggled with a legacy PACS system that had frequent downtime, slow loading, limited access to prior studies, and VPN vulnerabilities, while also supporting telehealth with remote radiologists reading from as far away as Hawaii. The hospital adopted Change Healthcare Stratus Imaging PACS and Stratus Imaging Share; rollout took only 15-30 minutes per workstation and completed within two weeks with minimal disruption. Results included an average image load time of 3.15 seconds, elimination of software-update downtime, reduced VPN dependency and CD-burning frequency, freed-up IT staff time for telehealth priorities, and third-party certified hosting/software that mitigated VPN-related breach risk. Director Jay Smith said the implementation "went much faster than previous projects" with "comprehensive explanations and support throughout."

The customer is anonymised in Optum’s own case study — not withheld by us.

Optum is UnitedHealth Group's data and analytics arm, with one of the largest raw claims and EHR-derived real-world-data footprints of any vendor in this directory.

This sits in the Data Providers stage of the AI use-case lifecycle: Named examples from the real-world-data, claims and competitive-intelligence providers pharma AI systems are trained on, benchmarked against, or run inside of.