No matter their purpose, many healthcare technology vendors follow a familiar playbook: Create a protected ecosystem for your solutions, make it hard for customers to use or integrate with products from competitors, then encourage them to go all-in on your product suite. This approach may seem advantageous for vendors in the short term, but it creates a lot of challenges for healthcare organizations and can negatively impact patient care.

As the CEO of a health tech company, I know how this mindset creates roadblocks for care delivery. For most healthcare organizations, the state of their technology infrastructure is the result of strategic decisions made over the course of decades, with bits and pieces being added or removed based on specific needs and circumstances and available resources. If we kick off our partnerships with these organizations by immediately telling them they need to start ripping and replacing existing systems, it’s going to be impractical, presumptuous, and counterproductive all at once.

Our industry needs to start embracing a different philosophy that makes integration and interoperability a core value, even when it means working with competitors. On its face, this doesn’t make a lot of sense in a hypercompetitive market, but it’s an important shift for a number of reasons.

First, let’s consider a few scenarios where interoperability is critical for patient care:

• When a stroke patient shows up at the emergency room, their medical history should be immediately available even if it’s spread across multiple systems — the ePCR from the ambulance service, the patient’s primary care EHR, and information about previous visits to the facility stored in different hospital systems. The patient’s chances of having a positive outcome increase when it takes less time to gather this information.
• An oncologist is coordinating care for a patient that involves multiple specialists, but none of them use the same platforms for communication or documentation. If these systems don’t share data, the oncologist may miss important info like medication changes or adverse reactions.
• A critical lab result reveals dangerous potassium levels and needs immediate attention. To make this happen, the lab system, the EHR, and the clinical communication platform need to share data seamlessly. Imagine the difference it makes for the patient when response times for critical lab results are 40 seconds instead of 40 minutes.

Cloud solutions help us overcome a lot of the hurdles that can make integration intimidating. For example:

• They use standardized APIs to connect with other systems seamlessly, but without the headache or expense of maintaining infrastructure on site.
• They also allow for immediate updates across all channels, keeping everything in sync. This means caregivers have critical information pushed to them automatically rather than asking them to track it down from other sources.
• Security protocols like OAuth 2.0 allow for detailed control, ensuring that only the right people have access to sensitive information while giving users easy access to other connected systems.
• Critically, this software is built using a bunch of independent parts that connect to one another — called a microservices architecture — which allows for individual parts to be updated without impacting (or even worse, breaking) the system as a whole.
• These event-driven systems can also ingest information about schedules, roles, and contact preferences to inform their rules engines, which ensures the right messages and alerts reach the right people at the right time using the right delivery method.

The larger point here is that circumstances have evolved to make widespread interoperability both possible and desirable. With the right integration platform, cloud solutions can:

• Process millions of transactions every day with near-instant response times
• Handle spikes in usage without slowing down by adjusting their capacity on the fly
• Self-heal if connection points break
• Assist compliance and troubleshooting efforts with ready auditability
• Support the rapid addition of new tools thanks to pre-built connection points

And don’t get me wrong — pursuing integration isn’t necessarily quick or inexpensive. It requires a big investment in R&D and ongoing maintenance. To do it successfully, it likely means developing and maintaining hundreds of integrations with partners and, yes, even your competitors. It’s costly in the short term, but healthcare organizations and the patients they serve will see tangible benefits.

Think about your average hospital environment: An EHR from one vendor, a PACS system from another, smart pumps from yet another, and who knows how many point solutions used by different departments for myriad purposes. These programs need to share data so it can easily be accessed by clinicians whenever they need it.

With better interoperability, we can:

• Help care teams coordinate patient care more seamlessly, even when they’re using different tech systems
• Give nurses instant access to all the patient information they need in one place
• Ensure physicians never miss critical alerts, regardless of which system generated them
• Help healthcare organizations gain useful insights by analyzing data from previously disconnected systems
• Free IT teams up to focus on large-scale strategic improvements rather than endlessly building custom app interfaces

We can’t take a “business as usual” approach anymore — the stakes are just too high. When systems integrate better, every minute saved by removing roadblocks is a minute given back to clinicians and patient care. It’s time for vendors in this space to treat interoperability as a core business strategy rather than a buzzword or another box to check as they’re going through the motions.

I realize this approach flies in the face of conventional wisdom in some regards, but this is healthcare. Doing what’s right for clinicians and patients, and helping our partners get more from the money they invest, should always be more important than creating artificial walls to keep technology systems apart.

So if you ask me, it’s not about whether interoperability is a good idea. It’s about making it happen as quickly as possible.

Photo: nicescene, Getty Images

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