Interoperability falls short of turning innovation into transformation. Here’s why.

While virtual care is changing the way that clinicians deliver and patients receive care in ways that we previously never thought were possible, it is, unfortunately, just another example of where digital disruptors have innovated in pockets without accelerating true industry-wide transformation. In actuality, digital health innovators must build and health organizations must adopt foundational operating systems that unite new solutions with legacy systems, so that clinicians aren’t left to connect all of these dots themselves. When it comes to the patient data needed to improve the healthcare experience, in place today are the bare-minimum foundations of interoperability piecemeal tools that lack the fundamental ability to securely share and structure this data at scale across hospital systems and EHRs to patients, providers, and payers alike. Our industry’s valiant efforts to improve care quality and the patient experience through digital innovation have inadvertently created an environment where people serve the technology not the other way around.

Too often, clinicians are put into positions where they have to compromise the care they provide: input into clinical technology or interface with patients; prioritize quality of outcomes or quantity of visits; document in the EHR after hours or focus on work-life balance at the risk of missing valuable information. Just as health organizations are collectively beginning to embrace patients as consumers of healthcare outcomes, digital health innovators should begin to consider clinicians as consumers of healthcare technology. Radical collaboration rather than disruptive innovation is the key to untangling clinicians from technology and empowering them to deliver care without compromise. By uniting an army of responsible innovators and connected technologies across the healthcare ecosystem, I believe that our collective healthcare industry can finally achieve true interoperability and begin to advance people-first care through meaningful transformation.