This post was written by Rachel Witalec, Redox’s Chief Product Officer.
When it comes to interoperability, if you feel like a frustrated little kid sitting in the back of the car screaming “are we there yet?”, you’re not alone.
Interoperability is often discussed as if it were a final destination—something we could one day “arrive at.” But experience has shown that interoperability doesn’t have a finish line. It is a living, evolving challenge that grows more complex with every new innovation, regulation, and partnership that reshapes our data ecosystem.
In a constantly shifting landscape, the real differentiator is how well your infrastructure can bend without breaking.
In this post, we’ll explore why flexibility is the key to true interoperability, and share how leading organizations are already demanding platforms that adapt to their unique workflows.
Individual point solutions create value. Together, they create complexity.
Over the last decade of helping our customers achieve real-time connectivity, we’ve consistently encountered sprawling tech stacks in healthcare. Industry research shows that more than half of healthcare organizations use between 50 and 500 unique software solutions to manage everything from operations and data to clinical workflows—with one health system executive even reporting over 1,600 individual applications in use. Take a minute and sit with that—it’s insane!
On top of that, every new connection requires custom logic to maintain, so every integration adds cost and risk. Standardizing and scaling across so many systems has become a barrier to agility and growth.
What starts as a best-in-class stack can quickly turn into a chaotic convoy of disconnected tools, requiring more effort spent managing the journey than reaching the destination.
No single vendor can solve every interoperability challenge.
After more than a decade in this business and completing 14K+ integrations, our experience has proven that healthcare is too diverse, too dynamic, and too specialized for one vendor to meet every need. The future of interoperability is plural. However, achieving the reality of unifying systems is just as painful as that last hour of a long road trip.
True interoperability is about keeping those systems in sync across fragmented architectures while balancing limited resources, growing compliance requirements, and increasing pressure to deliver results faster. Technical teams are being asked to do more with less (not to mention faster, too) and forced to operate across siloed systems that weren’t built to flex or scale.
Today’s rigid HIT infrastructures are hitting a dead end.
Even the best healthcare IT isn’t built for change. Systems are so tightly coupled that even minor updates can trigger cascading rework across the stack. Now layer in new devices, data sources, business models, and ecosystem partners and you’ve got an architecture that cracks under pressure.
Instead of tackling strategic problems, skilled engineers spend too much time just cleaning and reconciling data across silos. That’s time lost to technical debt: one-off logic, brittle middleware, and a web of custom integrations that barely keep things running, let alone moving forward.
These questions are keeping IT leaders up at night:
- If our infrastructure is maxed out maintaining the status quo, how will we respond when the next wave of complexity hits?
- If our IT team shrinks, how will we respond to market challenges while also keeping the lights on?
In recent years, requests from our customers have evolved. Instead of just making connections and translating data, they now have more complex workflow needs:
- “Defining our own, customizable set of API calls will allow us to iterate, permutate, and create all sorts of operational tools for clinicians which have widely varying data requirements.”
- “I need to take steps to clean this data and manipulate it like performing calculations, standardizing codes, or drawing insights before it’s ready to use”
- “We want you to check our patient roster to see if this patient is relevant before sending it to us.”
- “I want a data workflow that automatically fetches recent data like vitals and meds from my EHR and local networks, and then bundles that to send to another system to create a summary note that can be recorded into my EHR.“
We need a shared foundation: flexible enough to support custom workflows and filtering, and smart enough to deliver data that’s ready to use the moment it arrives.
And the urgency is growing.
Evolving federal regulations like TEFCA and CMS-0057 are reshaping how healthcare organizations exchange data. At the same time, the rise of AI is raising the bar for data quality and timeliness, exposing the limits of brittle legacy systems. Add to that the growing momentum around value-based care, and it’s clear: flexibility, connectivity, and actionable insights are no longer optional, they’re essential.
A rigid system can’t keep up with evolving compliance standards, changing partners, or new use cases. The organizations best positioned for the future are the ones investing in adaptable infrastructure that supports a broad range of formats, standards, and workflows.
Flexibility is a priority, not just a requirement.
Just like a GPS that recalculates your route in real-time, healthcare organizations need a platform that can adapt and evolve alongside their data ecosystem, today and into the future. Your tech infrastructure must be flexible enough to accommodate the evolution of health data itself.
The future of interoperability isn’t about picking a single route or sticking to one lane: it’s about building a flexible infrastructure that can navigate any terrain. One that brings data together from across the ecosystem and delivers it where it’s needed most—quickly, reliably, and at scale.
This vision is the roadmap guiding us forward. And it’s the reason we’ve reimagined the future of Redox: not as a detour around healthcare’s complexity, but as the engine that powers progress through it.
This October, we’ll share the next chapter of our journey with a platform that turns flexibility from a workaround into the foundation.
The future of healthcare won’t be defined by a single system or a single vendor. It will be shaped by organizations that can bring their ecosystems together to revolutionize patient care. We believe the future of interoperability is plural. And we’re backing our belief with action.
Stay tuned.