October 24th, 2026 / Articles
Beyond Connectivity: Why Healthcare’s Next Interoperability Challenge Is Data Quality
posted on Healthcare Business Today, by Sandra Johnson, SVP Client Services, CliniComp
For years, healthcare’s interoperability conversation was largely about technology.
We talked about standards, interfaces, APIs, data exchange and whether one system could communicate with another. The assumption was straightforward: If we could get the systems talking to each other, we would solve interoperability.
Healthcare has made meaningful progress toward that goal. More data can move between organizations and systems than ever before. Standards such as HL7 FHIR have made it easier to exchange information, and nationwide efforts such as TEFCA are expanding the reach of health information exchange.
But there is an important distinction the industry needs to confront:
Connectivity is not the same as interoperability, and access to data does not necessarily mean access to useful information.
The next challenge is not simply getting more data to move. It is making sure the data that moves is complete, accurate, timely, contextual and actionable.
We Solved the Connection. Now What?
Healthcare’s technology environment was built over decades. Hospitals accumulated EHRs, departmental systems, imaging platforms, laboratory systems, revenue cycle applications and countless point solutions, often from different vendors and with different data structures.
Connecting those systems was a necessary first step. But every connection also introduces another interface to build, maintain, monitor and eventually replace.
The result is an ecosystem that can be technically connected while remaining operationally fragmented.
A clinician may be able to retrieve information from another system, but still have to search for it, reconcile it with information in the local record, determine whether it is current, and interpret it in the context of everything else they know about the patient.
That isn’t the interoperability experience clinicians need. It is simply data exchange.
And as healthcare organizations accumulate more data, the distinction becomes increasingly important.
More Data Doesn’t Mean Better Data
Healthcare is awash in information. Every encounter, medication, laboratory result, image, vital sign, diagnosis and clinical note creates another piece of the patient’s digital record.
But more data does not automatically create more insight.
If information is incomplete, duplicated, inconsistently coded, poorly structured or disconnected from the clinical context in which it was generated, simply making it available does not make it useful.
Consider what happens when a clinician receives an outside record. The information may technically be accessible, but if it arrives as a document that must be opened separately, contains duplicate information, uses different terminology, or lacks the context surrounding a diagnosis or result, the clinician still has to do the work of assembling the story.
The problem has shifted.
We are moving from a data access problem to a data usability problem.
The goal of interoperability should not be to make more information available. It should be to make the right information available, in the right context, to the right person, at the right time.
That requires more than connectivity. It requires a data foundation capable of bringing information together, normalizing it, maintaining its context and presenting it in a way that supports the work clinicians are actually trying to do.
