The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has formed a new workgroup aimed at retiring the physical CD as the default way hospitals and imaging centers move X-rays, CT scans, and MRIs between providers. The effort, informally called “Ditch the Disk,” surfaced publicly in late July 2026 as part of the agency’s broader Health Technology Ecosystem initiative, reviving a cause radiologists have pushed since 2019.
HotSpot Take
CMS has launched a Diagnostic Imaging Acceleration workgroup, nicknamed “Ditch the Disk,” aimed at moving medical imaging exchange off physical CDs and onto electronic standards. The agency introduced the workgroup on July 27, 2026, then discussed it publicly the next day at an event marking the first anniversary of its Health Technology Ecosystem initiative. The effort builds on a campaign the American College of Radiology and RSNA have championed since 2019. Epic has already released a related capability inside its Care Everywhere network. CMS says the goal is to make imaging retrievable across organizations, within clinical workflows, and directly by patients, though the agency has not yet published the pledge’s technical requirements.
A New Pledge Inside CMS’s Health Tech Ecosystem
Medical imaging exchange is shifting from physical media to electronic standards under CMS’s new workgroup — Adobe Stock image
CMS launched the Diagnostic Imaging Acceleration workgroup, the agency’s formal name for the effort commonly shorthanded as Ditch the Disk, on July 27, 2026. According to CMS, the agency introduced it publicly the following day at an event at HHS headquarters marking the first anniversary of the Health Technology Ecosystem, a voluntary framework CMS describes as “a movement, not a mandate” rather than a regulatory requirement.
CMS’s own category page for the initiative lists Diagnostic Imaging Acceleration among 15 total pledge categories now under the Health Tech Ecosystem umbrella, alongside newer additions covering price transparency, real-time insurance benefits, modern scheduling, clinical trial matching, bulk FHIR data exchange, and pharmacy interoperability. Coverage of the anniversary event differs slightly in the count, with Becker’s Hospital Review and Nextgov each citing seven newly detailed categories and other outlets counting eight by including the still-forming imaging workgroup. Per Becker’s, the broader initiative has grown from roughly 60 pledged organizations at its July 2025 launch to more than 800 today, spanning technology vendors, federal agencies, and state health departments.
Chris Klomp, chief counselor at HHS, said at the event that “sixty percent of patients today in the United States can access their own record in an app of their choice,” according to Becker’s, up from an estimated 5 percent a year earlier, with the agency targeting 80 percent adoption by October. Amy Gleason, CMS deputy administrator and chief product officer, framed the initiative’s focus going forward around implementation rather than announcements: “That’s our job in year two: adoption,” she said, according to Becker’s reporting on the event.
Epic’s Care Everywhere Extends to Radiology
The imaging push has an early industry response. This month, Epic released a diagnostic image exchange capability inside its Care Everywhere network, extending a platform built for clinical records to radiology images such as CT scans, X-rays, and MRIs, according to Fierce Healthcare. The capability is designed to retrieve outside images in real time and route them into a hospital’s own picture archiving system, reducing manual transfers and, Epic says, unnecessary repeat imaging through order-checking.
“Patient care doesn’t know boundaries by organizations. Patient care goes wherever patients go,” said Matt Doyle, Epic’s interoperability director, according to Fierce Healthcare. Care Everywhere has operated since 2008 and, according to Epic, processed 914 million record exchanges in June 2026 alone, with roughly 30 million patient charts exchanged daily, about half of those with non-Epic systems. Fierce Healthcare reported that NYU Langone Medical Center imports approximately 15,000 imaging studies a month, a figure the outlet cited as an illustration of the volume involved in manual image sharing today.
A Campaign Radiology Has Waged Since 2019
The federal workgroup borrows both its name and its goal from an effort the American College of Radiology has run since 2019. The original #DitchTheDisk campaign, launched with participation from RSNA and other industry partners, used advocacy, standards development, and social media outreach to push providers away from CD-based image sharing, according to ACR’s announcement of the new CMS workgroup. That history matters for context: radiologists and imaging vendors have spent years documenting the operational drag of image exchange that still runs through physical media, from delayed reads to patients hand-carrying discs between appointments. The CMS workgroup, per ACR, aims to make imaging “seamlessly and electronically retrievable across organizations, within clinical workflows, and by patients.”
Vendors in the imaging space have been building toward interoperable exchange independent of the federal push. HealthTech HotSpot has previously covered the shift toward cloud-native imaging platforms and the broader move toward enterprise imaging workflows that don’t depend on locally stored files. A CMS-backed pledge would give that migration a federal reference point, even without regulatory teeth behind it.
Voluntary Pledges, Unfinished Details
CMS has not yet published the technical requirements organizations would need to meet to join the Diagnostic Imaging Acceleration pledge. As of this writing, the agency’s own category page for the pledge reads “Official Pledge Coming Soon,” with no published list of participants or required data standards. A report from Canadian Healthcare Technology described specific technical standards, including FHIR ImagingStudy, DICOMweb, and SMART Imaging Access, and named more than 20 early participating organizations. Those specifics could not be independently confirmed against CMS’s own published materials or ACR’s announcement, and should be treated as reported by Canadian Healthcare Technology pending CMS’s formal pledge release.
The voluntary structure of the broader Health Tech Ecosystem has also drawn scrutiny. Nextgov reported that the initiative’s first year included a National Provider Directory data exposure involving some physicians’ Social Security numbers, along with questions about web-tracking practices in some Medicare.gov-recommended patient apps. Those episodes don’t directly implicate the new imaging workgroup, but they underscore that a pledge-based model depends on participants following through without the enforcement mechanism a regulation would carry.
What It Could Mean for Patients
If the imaging pledge follows the same trajectory as CMS’s other Health Tech Ecosystem categories, the near-term signal to watch is adoption, not announcement. For patients, the practical test is simple: whether a referral to a new specialist or a transfer between hospitals still requires carrying a disc, or whether the prior scan simply shows up in the next provider’s system. CMS has said that is the intent. Whether radiology follows the rest of the industry toward that outcome now depends on the pledge CMS has yet to publish, and on how many imaging vendors and health systems sign onto it once it does.
— This original article was created with AI support.
