Breaking Down Barriers to Healthcare Interoperability in 2025
A practitioner perspective by David Navarro, Senior Director of Data Science, Harmony Healthcare IT.
The argument
Interoperability has advanced but full connectivity remains distant. Legislative mandates, standardized formats such as HL7 FHIR, and AI are the three forces that will break the remaining barriers across care settings.
Why we picked it
The HTC editorial desk curates practitioner perspectives that pass a simple test: would a health system executive, product leader, or investor act differently after reading it? This piece by David Navarro earns its place - it comes from the operating trenches of health it & interoperability, not the conference stage, and it takes a position specific enough to disagree with.
The bigger picture
The AI adoption question runs through every executive conversation in 2026. The evidence base is finally arriving: the largest controlled study of ambient documentation, published in JAMA, found clinicians saved 16 minutes of documentation time per day - but only a third of users hit the usage threshold for maximum benefit (our coverage). Meanwhile Rock Health has stopped labeling AI as a differentiator at all, because every company claims it - which is exactly why operating discipline of the kind described here separates winners from demo-ware.
Read it alongside our own reporting in Health IT & Interoperability, where the data behind this debate is covered daily on the HTC Wire.