Why healthcare’s next interoperability challenge is human
Interoperability has yet to transform care. While the technology to enable it has matured, organizational capability to use it has not.
Healthcare has spent decades learning how to exchange data. The next challenge is designing organizations that can turn that data into better decisions, better experiences and better care.
For much of the past two decades, interoperability has been viewed primarily as a technical challenge. The industry's focus was on connecting systems, standardizing data and enabling secure, reliable information exchange across organizations. Those priorities were both necessary and transformative.
Because of significant progress in standards such as HL7 FHIR, expanded regulatory support, and years of investment by providers, payers and technology vendors, healthcare has made tremendous strides toward answering them.
According to the 2026 State of FHIR Report, 80 percent of respondents now say FHIR is either mandated or recommended by national policy, while 62 percent report active FHIR use cases in their countries, evidence that interoperability has moved well beyond experimentation and into mainstream implementation.
Yet if you ask many health system leaders whether interoperability has transformed care, the answer is often more nuanced. The technology has matured, but the organizational capability has not.
Healthcare's next interoperability challenge is no longer primarily technical. Increasingly, it is human.
From moving data to creating value
For years, interoperability success was largely defined by technical achievement: implementing standards, connecting systems and enabling data exchange across organizations. Those capabilities remain essential, but they are no longer where healthcare creates value.
Today's healthcare leaders face a different challenge, which is how to turn interoperable data into better decisions, better workflows and better experiences for clinicians and patients. That shift fundamentally changes the conversation.
Data, by itself, creates very little value. Data becomes valuable only when people know how to use it. The industry is moving from building highways for information to designing the traffic patterns that enable people to reach meaningful destinations.
In other words, interoperability is no longer simply about exchange. It is about activation.
Interoperability is a multidisciplinary sport
One of the biggest misconceptions in healthcare is that interoperability belongs exclusively to technology teams. It doesn't.
As connected data becomes foundational to AI, care coordination, remote monitoring, hospital-at-home programs and consumer-facing digital health, interoperability increasingly requires collaboration among clinicians, operational leaders, designers, engineers, patients, informaticists and executives.
Technology may enable the exchange of information. People determine whether that information improves care.
Consider something as seemingly straightforward as supporting patients with advanced illness at home. The technology to exchange information from remote monitoring devices into clinical systems largely exists today. But designing a service that helps clinicians interpret that information, supports family caregivers, integrates with existing workflows and avoids overwhelming care teams requires expertise that extends well beyond APIs or implementation guides.
The same is true for AI. Much of the industry's attention has focused on model performance. Far less attention has been paid to how those insights fit into clinical workflows, who acts on them, how accountability is shared or how patients experience the result.
The technology enables the exchange. The real work lies in designing experiences that make that exchange meaningful.
Designing for consumers, not just patients
Healthcare is also beginning to recognize another important shift. Historically, organizations designed systems for patients receiving care inside traditional healthcare settings.
Today's consumers expect something different. They arrive with information from wearable devices, remote monitoring technologies, smartphones and increasingly sophisticated digital tools. They expect information to move with them, services to be coordinated and interactions to feel connected rather than fragmented.
Other industries already have made this transition. For example, financial services no longer compete primarily on their ability to process transactions. They compete on the customer experience built around those transactions. Behind every seamless banking app lies a highly interoperable infrastructure, but consumers rarely think about the technology itself.
Healthcare has an opportunity to follow a similar path. Patients should experience coordinated care, not coordinated systems.
A new role for CIOs
As interoperability enters its next phase, the workforce required to support it will look very different from the one that built it.
For years, interoperability conversations centered on implementation timelines, technical standards and regulatory compliance. Today, CIOs have an opportunity to lead a much broader discussion, one that connects technology strategy with organizational strategy.
Nearly every major healthcare priority, from AI adoption and digital transformation to patient engagement and new care models, depends on trusted, interoperable data. That makes interoperability far more than an IT function; it has become an enterprise capability.
Building that capability will require more than engineering expertise alone. CIOs will need multidisciplinary teams that bring together clinicians, governance leaders, workflow designers, implementation specialists, change management experts and technologists who understand not only how data moves, but how it creates value.
Connecting systems remains essential. The next challenge is designing organizations that can turn connected data into better decisions, better experiences, and better care.
Building the next generation of interoperability
Healthcare has spent years teaching systems how to exchange information. The next phase will involve helping organizations create value from that information.
Standards, APIs, and infrastructure remain essential, but they are no longer where organizations will distinguish themselves. The differentiator will be their ability to integrate technology with governance, clinical insight, service design and multidisciplinary collaboration to improve the way care is delivered and experienced.
Healthcare's next interoperability challenge isn't technical anymore. It's human. Because the future of interoperability won't be defined by how successfully we connect data, it will be defined by how thoughtfully we connect people, workflows and care around it.
Prof. Rachel Dunscombe is chief executive officer of HL7 International, where she leads global efforts to advance interoperability and standards that enable scalable, data-driven healthcare.