Radiologists who encountered friction early found ways around it. Turnaround times that were expected to improve stayed flat and the efficiency gains that justified the investment never materialized. By the end of the first year, leadership was questioning the decision.
To anyone who has championed a technology investment, this is a nightmare scenario. You attach your credibility to the outcome, so if it doesn’t deliver, the technology absorbs the blame publicly, while you carry the consequence internally. We hear versions of this story often, usually from leaders who come to us after experiencing it elsewhere. The outcome itself is rarely the most frustrating part, rather it’s that the warning signs were visible much earlier, if you knew where to look.
The Finish Line Fallacy
Go-live is treated as the finish line because it’s visible, measurable and easy to celebrate. In practice, success or failure is determined in the months that follow. We tell customers it’s a milestone in the process of deploying and adopting a new product, it’s not the end of the journey. Not even close.
It’s more useful to think of go-live as the wedding ceremony — coordinated, planned and public. What follows is the marriage, and that’s where most partnerships, personally and professionally, are tested. The period immediately after determines the trajectory of the entire relationship.
This is when adoption patterns form and begin to harden. A radiologist who encounters friction on day three may file a ticket, or may simply find a faster path around the issue. If no one is paying close attention, within a few months the problem is no longer technical but behavioral.
That early window is where a partner proves their value. One committed to the long-haul treats this period as a managed process, staying close enough to the workflow to catch issues in real time and intervening early. The other moves on to the next deployment.
What the RFP Process Doesn’t Reveal
Procurement processes are effective at evaluating features, security requirements and implementation timelines. They are less effective at revealing what partnership looks like once the system is in place. The way to surface this earlier isn’t by asking more product questions but by asking operational ones:
● What does support look like immediately after go-live in practice?
● Who is accountable for outcomes once the system is live?
● What does their day-to-day engagement actually look like?
● What is being monitored to understand whether adoption is working?
● How frequently is that information shared?
Another consideration: Does the vendor have implementation expertise embedded in the sales process itself, someone whose job is to surface integration dependencies and organizational complexity before commitments are made? That structure is a reliable indicator of how seriously a vendor takes what happens after go-live.
The Implementation Work That Determines Everything
The human side of a technology transition is the hardest part, and it’s usually the most overlooked. Many implementation failures aren’t technical. They’re organizational, and they tend to arrive disguised as success. The project team schedules the town halls, produces the training materials, sends the announcements and checks the change management boxes. Leaders walk away believing they’ve brought the organization along, but what they’ve actually done is inform people.
Part of the challenge is that different stakeholders approach the transition from different perspectives. Buyers focus on outcomes. Vendors focus on capabilities. IT teams focus on integrations. Clinicians experience the system through workflow. Alignment amongst all stakeholders is assumed.
What differentiates a strong partnership is whether those differences are identified early or discovered later, when they’re harder to resolve. That requires involving users in the process, not just during training, and shaping the rollout around how the organization actually operates. It also requires acknowledging dependencies that exist outside the immediate project.
Finally, successful implementations need an internal champion. In radiology, that role is typically filled by a physician who understands both the workflow and the technology. As Tom Hasley, Chief Information Officer of LucidHealth, noted in a recent discussion, organizations without internal advocates tend to struggle regardless of the tools they select.
What a Real Partnership Actually Looks Like
There’s no shortage of conversation in this industry about what AI will eventually replace. What gets less attention is what it can’t. A radiologist's confidence in their tools doesn’t show up in an uptime report or a feature comparison. It’s built slowly, through consistent experience, and it erodes the same way — gradually and then suddenly, in ways that are difficult to reverse once the pattern is set. In an era defined by what technology can automate, the thing that determines whether an investment actually delivers remains stubbornly human.
AI performance can shift based on subtle environmental changes and usage patterns, and reactive support is both inadequate and a liability in that context. The value of the right partner is not measured by the absence of issues but by how they’re handled. How quickly they are identified, how the team engages when they surface and whether small problems get resolved before they become the kind of entrenched doubt that no configuration update can fix.
Several months after LucidHealth's go-live with Rad AI Reporting, a small but meaningful issue emerged. A radiologist's speech recognition performance had degraded slightly — not enough to prompt a complaint but enough that left unresolved, it would have introduced friction into the workflow. The issue was identified and addressed before it was raised.
"I was actually surprised," Hasley said. "Somebody reached out before we had to call in and issue a support ticket. The radiologist hadn't even said anything. It was just picked up in the background." What mattered wasn’t the detection itself but the timing. The radiologist never lost confidence in the system because the issue was resolved before it affected their experience.
What made that possible wasn’t the technology alone. It was the people behind it — implementation leads who surface misalignments before go-live, customer success managers who stay close enough to the workflow to catch issues in real time and the clinical and operational expertise that allows them to understand what they’re seeing when they do. In an industry that spends considerable energy debating what AI will replace, the answer here is straightforward: not this.
Ensuring a technology investment delivers on its promise requires people who treat that responsibility as their own, who define success not by tickets closed or systems maintained but by whether the outcomes that justified the investment are showing up in practice — and whether the radiologists using the system trust it enough to let it work.
That isn’t a feature. It’s a commitment. And it’s the only thing that turns a go-live into a lasting partnership. Everyone comes to the wedding. Not everyone stays for the marriage.
Joseph Mack is Vice President of Customer Success at Rad AI
Lisa Soltz is Vice President of Implementations at Rad AI
