Imaging turnaround time has increased about 177% since 2014. Acquisition to interpretation went from roughly two hours to more than six, measured on Medicare claims data, and most of that increase happened in just the last several years.
That figure comes from a commentary published last month in the Journal of the American College of Radiology by the Harvey L. Neiman Health Policy Institute.
What the commentary actually argues
The Neiman authors were responding to a claim made in a 2026 JAMA Health Forum article suggesting that declining imaging use had allowed the United States to meet demand without adding radiologists.
Their position is that the claim rests on outdated utilization data. The evidence they point to runs the other way:
Imaging volume and complexity are both increasing
Radiologist workload continues to rise
Imaging demand is projected to grow 17 to 27% by 2055
Reimbursement has fallen by nearly 50%
Turnaround time, the most direct measure of system strain, is up 177%
As coauthor Richard Duszak Jr., MD, put it, accurate workforce planning depends on accurately understanding demand. If leaders believe capacity is sufficient, they underestimate the access problem forming underneath them.
Why turnaround is the number that matters
Volume statistics describe a system. Turnaround time describes a patient.
A six-hour gap between acquisition and interpretation is not an abstraction to the person waiting on a result, or to the clinician who ordered it and has to make a decision without it. It is the point where capacity strain stops being an operational concern and becomes a clinical one.
It is also the number that gets worse quietly. No one files an incident report because a study took four hours longer than it would have in 2014.
What a department can realistically change
Most of the drivers above are outside any single department's control.
You cannot fix reimbursement. You cannot grow the radiologist pipeline this quarter. Hiring a subspecialty radiologist or an experienced 3D technologist takes months when it works at all, and CT technologist vacancies reached 19.4% in the 2025 ASRT staffing survey, the highest of any imaging discipline.
What is inside your control is how the work is distributed.
Not every task between the scanner and the read requires the scarcest person in the building. Reconstructions, measurements, segmentation, and quantitative analysis are specialized technical work. They have to be done well, by someone trained, to protocol. They do not have to be done by someone sitting in your department.
Separating that work from physician interpretation is one of the few levers that operates on a timescale shorter than a hiring cycle. Every hour of technical work moved off a stretched team is an hour that team spends on what only they can do.
Where Precision Image Analysis fits
Precision Image Analysis (PIA) is a cloud based post-processing partner. Hospitals and imaging centers send us CT and MR studies across cardiac, vascular, neuro, oncology and ortho. Our certified technologists do the work on the same platforms a hospital 3D lab runs, including TeraRecon, Circle, 3Mensio, Neosoft, SuiteHeart and PIE.
Results return to your PACS appended to the original study as a single series. Your radiologists can log into the PIA Cloud and work in the software directly, and reach the technologist assigned to a case inside the platform.
Turnaround is published, not described:
6 cases per week: 2 to 12 hours
12 cases per week: 4 to 24 hours
24 cases per week: 8 to 48 hours
48 cases per week: 16 to 96 hours
No capital request. No license to maintain. No gap when someone is out. Full volume or overflow only.
The 177% figure describes a decade of slow accumulation.
Post-processing is the part of it you can change this quarter.