Bridging the Interoperability Gap: Turning Data into Connected Care

Despite all the progress and investment into healthcare technology, interoperability is still a balancing act. Critical data can often be right in front of us, but unreachable, trapped behind competing privacy protocols, incompatible system formats, or simply barriers that keep data out of reach. The impact of these issues is widespread, causing delayed care, increasing costs, and patients having to repeat their stories, symptoms, and frustration to multiple providers. It can feel like things never move forward. 

At the heart of these issues is the lack of a single, connected patient record. Instead, information is spread across multiple siloes that don’t talk to each other, and patients are paying the price. But interoperability isn’t just about making systems talk to each other. It’s also about building a single, robust medical history for every patient that follows them wherever they go for the rest of their lives, enabling comprehensive, quality, and personalized care.

And healthcare leaders already know what’s holding progress back. In the latest HIMSS Interoperability report, more than half of healthcare leaders report that inconsistent information exchange and regulatory requirements are daily obstacles, with 53% of respondents pointing to inconsistent standards and 50% naming compliance issues. Still, the goal remains unchanged: get all the right data, to the right people, at the right time, without putting patients at risk. That is what true interoperability should deliver. And ultimately, it’s what will make the dream of one unified patient record possible to achieve. So why does it feel so hard, and what comes next?

Interoperability’s Toughest Roadblocks

There is no shortage of data in healthcare— estimates suggest it will reach 10 zettabytes this year and up to 97% of it will go unused— but not enough ways to share it safely and usefully, especially when there are compounding issues making it feel nearly impossible to achieve interoperability. 

According to the HIMSS report, smaller organizations worry most about compliance. Nearly three out of four healthcare leaders in facilities with fewer than 2,500 employees say compliance is their biggest barrier. Larger health systems face different hurdles: 58% report a shortage of IT staff and 56% point to slow vendor adoption of standards. These barriers don’t just slow down interoperability, they also prevent us from creating the single source of truth that all patients need and deserve: a lifelong record of their care. 

Security: Protecting and Advancing the Single Record

Healthcare isn’t just a target for cybercriminals—it’s a bullseye. Data breaches are a recurring reality and leaders recognize that security is now a moving target. According to the HIMSS report, nearly three out of four health leaders say that investing in robust data security measures is the single most important step to advancing interoperability. A layered approach is non-negotiable: encryption, firewalls, and technical safeguards matter, but so does training every staff member, building in compliance, and putting real controls on who can access sensitive information. Security takes on new urgency when the goal is a single, unified patient record. For patients and providers to trust it, protection can’t just be compliant, it must be ironclad. 

The Data Dilemma: Standardization and the Human Factor

While the dream is one clean, connected patient record, the reality is something messier, created by too much healthcare data living in incompatible formats. Hospitals generate roughly 137 terabytes of data every day, more than 80% of it unstructured— things like handwritten notes and scanned forms— in countless formats that rarely work together with ease. This fragmentation is the primary reason that so few patients actually have single, complete healthcare records. 

But leaders know the fix: eight out of ten HIMSS respondents say that adopting and leveraging FHIR and HL7 standards is critical when choosing technology partners. But these aren’t just technical choices. They’re the language of universal patient records, and among the largest healthcare organizations, five out of six leaders describe these standards as essential. 

 Artificial intelligence is beginning to play a role in managing data and making it useful, especially as natural language processors get faster at finding patterns and important details in unstructured data. But AI isn’t a magic bullet, it relies on high standards, strong governance and proper accountability across a truly interoperable platform to access comprehensive longitudinal record data to reach it’s full potential.

The Future: One Record, Many Benefits

When interoperability works, benefits ripple out quickly. Thirty-six percent of leaders in small organizations say better coordinated care is their biggest win, and a third of large organizations point to more clinician time with patients. But they all agree interoperability lowers costs, reduces wasted effort, and builds a foundation for innovation.

But the ultimate benefit is both simple and profound: a single patient record that follows them for their lifetime. Imagine arriving in an ER and the team already knows your medications, allergies, and last lab results, without you saying a word. Imagine switching providers and never filling out the forms twice. Imagine doctors seeing the full picture, not fragments. That’s what interoperability unlocks.

There’s plenty of reason for optimism. Every improvement in interoperability is an investment in creating common standards, accountability and clarity that make a single, unified medical record possible for every patient. It’s also a step toward a healthcare system where data moves at the speed of care and a call for healthcare leaders to invest in people and technology, embrace high standards, and never lose sight of the patient at the center of it all. 

Most importantly, it’s a step closer to the one patient record every individual deserves—a record that makes care faster, safer, and more human.