Radiologist turned founder, Dr. Cristin Dickerson, didn’t plan to run a company, she just wanted to do her job. But after seeing hospital acquisitions triple imaging prices and claims processes fail patients and doctors alike, Dr. Cristin looked to an unlikely category to find a solution. She built Green Imaging: a “Travelocity-style” marketplace that buys unused scanner time, bundles the entire episode of care, and passes transparent savings to employers and patients.
Key takeaways from our conversation:
Unused capacity, fair bundles: “We started buying the extra time on the scanner, our radiologists read it, and we bill a fair self-pay price.” The result is one all-in rate, no surprise CPT add-ons or separate radiology bills.
Employer-first economics: “Employers can waive member co-pays and deductibles with Green, and still save money.” For self-funded plans, members pay $0 out of pocket while plans avoid hospital rates and unbundled charges.
Concierge beats DIY: “Consumerism has failed in healthcare, when people are under stress, they want to be taken care of.” Green Imaging leans on live, multilingual concierges to educate, schedule, and simplify every step.
Hospital alignment without bloat: By leasing time (they’re Green’s patients) and using Green’s radiologists, exclusivity hurdles drop—unlocking partnerships such as PET/CT reads and filling idle capacity.
Bootstrapped resilience: “I worked full-time as a radiologist until 2020 to subsidize it.” The team survived a co-founder’s sudden passing, COVID’s volume collapse, and an IP lawsuit, without layoffs, growing to 5,000+ facilities and ~3M covered lives, still majority physician-owned.
With the success of Green Imaging, Dr. Dickerson proves that there are creative ways to solve all kinds of problems. Even the behemoth of healthcare.
Learn more at Green Imaging, and check out Dr. Dickerson’s book, Aligned, for a plain-English guide to making healthcare incentives work for patients, employers, and clinicians.
