In healthcare, interoperability is an essential goal with no shortage of challenges. At ChartRequest, we believe data accessibility is essential for delivering the highest quality of care.
Imagine a truly connected healthcare ecosystem, where patient information flows seamlessly as needed. This level of access could reduce duplicative testing, eliminate unnecessary treatments, and save more lives by enabling informed care without delay.
However, the path to achieving full interoperability in healthcare is paved with complex challenges that impact every facet of the healthcare journey.
What Is Interoperability in Healthcare?
Interoperability in healthcare means that different systems, devices, and applications can securely exchange and use patient information across multiple settings.
This includes records from primary care visits, specialist consultations, laboratory results, imaging reports, prescription histories, and behavioral health services. In advanced systems, it also includes data on social determinants of health, transitions of care, and prior authorization activity.
The ultimate goal is to create a complete and coordinated view of each patient’s health that is easily accessible by authorized professionals. This level of access supports safer, faster, and more informed decisions.
Achieving this vision requires more than just sending records from one system to another. Interoperability involves multiple layers: foundational exchange, standardized formats, shared terminology, and aligned policies.
Standards such as HL7 FHIR are helping to drive consistency, but adoption remains uneven across the healthcare landscape.
Interoperability frameworks like the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA) also aim to address this gap by establishing technical and legal standards for health information networks.
Why is Interoperability Important in Healthcare?
Healthcare depends on timely, accurate information. Delivering safe, coordinated, and efficient care is challenging when patient data is fragmented across unconnected systems.
Interoperability allows providers, patients, and supporting organizations to access and share the information they need, regardless of where that data originated. Without this foundational capability, the consequences extend far beyond technical inconvenience.
Gaps in data sharing can delay diagnoses, increase costs, jeopardize patient safety, and undermine care quality. Impacts of poor interoperability in healthcare include:
Fragmented Patient Data
When patients receive care from multiple providers, their health information often becomes scattered.
Electronic health record (EHR) vendors often develop their systems using proprietary designs that do not follow a common set of rules. This means many systems store data in a unique format and cannot easily transmit that information to other systems.
When two providers want to exchange PHI, their systems may not recognize or interpret the data in the same way. Without consistent formats and shared definitions, records from one source cannot be easily read or integrated by another.
This fragmentation of the patient’s medical history can lead to incomplete assessments and inconsistent treatment decisions.
Inefficiencies and Redundancies
When providers cannot access a patient’s complete record at the point of care, they often repeat work already done. This includes ordering duplicate lab tests, rescheduling imaging procedures, or re-collecting patient histories. These redundancies drive up costs, create delays, and pull staff away from direct patient care.
The financial impact is significant. A lack of interoperability is estimated to cost the U.S. healthcare system over $30 billion each year in avoidable inefficiencies, including administrative overhead, unnecessary testing, and delayed treatment decisions.
Without reliable data exchange, staff rely on phone calls, faxes, and manual re-entry of patient information. These labor-intensive processes not only slow down operations but also contribute to clinician frustration and burnout. For patients, this often means longer wait times, repeated paperwork, and gaps in care continuity.
Compromised Patient Safety
One of the most alarming outcomes of poor interoperability is its direct threat to patient safety. Missing or outdated information can lead to serious harm or even death.
A 2017 safety report analysis for 209 patient safety events related to interoperability found:
- 18% of reported safety hazards created potentially unsafe conditions
- 26% of these incidents were a “near miss” that did not reach the patient
- 53% of these incidents reached patients without causing harm
- 2% of these incidents resulted in actual patient harm
Manual workflows increase this risk. When clinicians must rely on incomplete data or re-enter information by hand, the likelihood of errors rises. Interoperable systems help reduce these risks by improving data accuracy and supporting safer care transitions.
Hindered Care Coordination
Effective care coordination depends on the timely and accurate exchange of patient data between providers. When systems are not interoperable, key information often fails to reach the next point of care, such as:
- Medication changes
- Care plans
- Test results
- Discharge instructions
Poor interoperability causes care coordination breakdowns that create gaps in care. These gaps can increase the risk of harm for patients who rely on multiple providers.
Strong care coordination between providers requires systems that support reliable, real-time information sharing at every stage of care.
Challenges in Data Analytics and Research
Interoperability plays a critical role not just in individual care, but in shaping population health, accelerating research, and informing health system strategy.
Aggregating large volumes of health data, known as “Big Data Analytics” in healthcare, enables organizations to:
- Identify emerging trends
- Track disease outbreaks
- Evaluate treatment efficacy
- Improve public health initiatives
- Accelerate medical research.
However, when health data is siloed in disconnected systems, its analytical value is diminished.
On the research front, the absence of interoperable infrastructure can impede clinical studies. Without common interoperability standards, data silos limit our collective ability to derive meaningful insights and drive innovation.
What Causes Interoperability Challenges in Healthcare?
Despite years of investment, healthcare still struggles to share patient data across systems in a consistent and reliable way, and interoperability remains a common challenge.
The barriers are not only technical. Business models can discourage open data sharing. Privacy regulations are complex and often interpreted differently across organizations. Many workflows rely on manual steps that slow things down or introduce errors.
These issues are connected, and solving one without addressing the others rarely leads to meaningful progress. Understanding the full scope of these challenges is the first step toward building systems that improve safety, access, and efficiency.
Diverse EHR Systems and Proprietary Software:
One of the most fundamental barriers to interoperability is the fragmented nature of electronic health record (EHR) systems. These systems differ not only in their technical architecture but also in how they structure and label clinical data.
Compounding the problem, many EHR vendors design their platforms as proprietary solutions that operate in isolation from external systems. These “closed ecosystems” limit the ability to share information. Reasons include:
- Lack of open APIs
- Use of non-standard formats
- Data export restrictions
- Vendor lock-in strategies
- Inconsistent implementation of standards
- Lack of incentives for interoperability
- Limited documentation or developer access
This lack of interoperability between EHR systems forces healthcare providers to rely on inefficient workarounds, such as printing, faxing, or manually re-entering patient information.
Inconsistent Standards and Terminologies
A major interoperability challenge is the uneven use of technical and clinical data standards. While critical data standards like HL7 (Health Level Seven) and FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) support structured data exchange, their adoption is still not universal.
Clinical terminology varies as well. Health systems may code the same diagnosis, lab test, or medication using different internal codes. These differences can cause data loss or misinterpretation when information is shared between systems.
This leads to inconsistent data formats, varying interpretations of medical terms, and differing coding practices, making it challenging for disparate systems to “speak the same language” and accurately interpret shared information.
Regulatory Complexity and Data Privacy Concerns:
Privacy regulations are essential to protecting sensitive health information and maintaining patient trust.
The HIPAA Right of Access Initiative and the 21st Century Cures Act require healthcare providers and health IT developers to avoid information blocking and support patient access to records.
However, these overlapping regulations can create confusion. Organizations often interpret the rules differently. Concerns about triggering a breach notification or failing a compliance audit can lead to overly cautious decisions.
As a result, health information may be withheld, even when sharing it would improve care.
In many cases, the problem is not the regulation itself but the lack of clarity in how to apply it during day-to-day operations. Questions about patient consent, research use, or what constitutes a permitted disclosure can delay or block data exchange.
Pervasiveness of Legacy Systems:
Many hospitals and large provider networks still operate on infrastructure built before modern data exchange standards were established, which often:
- Lack support for current interoperability protocols
- Use outdated data formats
- Are challenging to integrate with newer platforms.
Replacing or upgrading these systems is not simple. Legacy environments are often deeply embedded in clinical workflows, billing systems, and reporting structures.
Transitioning to a modern solution may require years of planning, custom development, data migration, and retraining. For some organizations, especially those with limited budgets or high patient volumes, the disruption and cost are difficult to absorb.
As a result, many health systems attempt to build temporary bridges between old and new systems rather than pursue full replacement.
Cost and Resource Constraints:
The transition to interoperable systems requires significant financial and human capital, such as:
- New software,
- Network infrastructure,
- Data standardization tools,
- Long-term support.
- Ongoing staff training
For large health systems, these costs can be planned for and absorbed over time. The cost for smaller practices, community health centers, and rural hospitals may be more prohibitive.
The Path to Interoperability
At ChartRequest, we are focused on enhancing interoperability in healthcare by removing the barriers that prevent timely, secure access to patient information.
Our solutions are designed to support the compliant exchange of Protected Health Information (PHI) by connecting providers, patients, and legal requestors through a streamlined and secure process.
By simplifying record retrieval and reducing the need for manual follow-up, we help healthcare organizations improve care coordination, reduce delays, and lower administrative burden.
We believe interoperability is not just about moving data. It is about making information available when and where it is needed to support safer, more efficient care.
Ready to learn more? Explore our purpose-built solutions for healthcare organizations of all sizes.
