Opinion: Beyond connectivity — making health data meaningful across systems

Health care has never been more connected. Across Australia, secure messaging, My Health Record modernisation, AU Core, the Australian Core Data for Interoperability and AU eRequesting are moving information sharing towards a consistent, common format, so it can be understood by any system that receives it. For technology leaders, that progress creates an important next question: what are those connections actually enabling?

Information is moving between systems, but workflows remain fragmented. Clinicians are still having to search across systems, interpret long PDFs, rekey information captured elsewhere and question whether information can be trusted.

This is the paradox at the centre of digital health today: we are more connected than ever, but still not coordinated. The challenge is no longer whether information can move, but whether it is surfaced at the right time, with enough meaning, context and trust to support care.

Moving information is only the first step

For years, interoperability centred on establishing connections: could a discharge summary reach general practice or a residential aged care facility, or a diagnostic report be uploaded and retrieved? Those capabilities remain important, but simply moving information does not guarantee it will be useful.

For information to support the next step in care, its meaning, context and provenance must travel with it. The receiving system and clinician need to understand what the information means, the circumstances in which it was captured, where it came from and how current it is.

That is why the next chapter of interoperability cannot simply be measured by the number of connections we have built. It must be measured by whether those connections make care safer, faster and more coordinated.

What happens when people become the integration layer

Those gaps are tangible in everyday workflows. A clinician building a current view of a person’s care may need to reconcile medication histories, discharge summaries, pathology results and specialist letters before confidently making a care decision.

In effect, people can become the integration layer between systems. For technology decision-makers, this is an important test of interoperability. If people still need to manually transfer or reconcile information between systems, the workflow remains fragmented.

Over time, both fragmented information and workflows make continuity of care more difficult to maintain and create additional work for both clinicians and patients. A coordinated care experience should do the opposite: reduce the work on both sides, give clinicians and care providers confidence in their data and help all of us feel more understood when receiving care.

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What this looks like in practice

eRequesting

Consider one of health care’s most routine transactions: a pathology request. This workflow still largely relies on highly manual processes such as printing PDFs and rekeying information.

Structured eRequesting creates a coordinated flow. A request is created once from information already in the clinician’s system and moves as usable, structured data. This supports an automated end-to-end process in which information flows both ways, results are matched to the original request and fewer steps require manual intervention.

It sounds simple, and that is exactly the point. Some of the most valuable interoperability does not look like a major technology disruptor. It looks like an everyday process, becoming easier.

Supporting residents through earlier recognition of deterioration

Now, let’s take the same pattern into residential aged care. A resident’s daily observations, notes and medications are recorded consistently inside the facility, but deterioration in older people often builds quietly over days. In most cases, the facility’s systems already hold enough data to signal that a resident is deteriorating — but that data isn’t in one place, and there simply isn’t the time for staff to review each resident, every day, to identify these emerging patterns.

A consolidated, dynamic view of those observations, notes and medications could help care teams see changes in a resident’s condition earlier, prompting review and supporting earlier intervention before the resident’s condition deteriorates further.

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Building the foundation for what comes next

Health care needs standards-based, FHIR-native infrastructure so that clinical information retains its meaning as it moves. It must work with existing systems and embed governance, consent, provenance and audit in the information itself. This may be less glamorous than the technologies attracting attention, but it’s critical to making clinical information both safe and useful.

Many organisations are exploring how AI can support care through ambient documentation, clinical summaries, decision support and new models of care. But advanced technology cannot compensate for incomplete clinical data; it scales its weaknesses. Outputs built on fragmented records, missing histories or unverified information inherit those flaws, only faster and with unearned confidence.

Quality data and strong, standards-based interoperability foundations help ensure these emerging technologies can deliver meaningful, usable information at the point of care, and the ability to scale across other workflows.

The next interoperability solve: context, meaning and coordinated care

The opportunity now is to reframe interoperability from the connection itself to the value of information when it arrives. Does it remove the need to search, reconcile and reconstruct what has already happened? Is the information presented at the right time? Ultimately, does it reduce the work required to enable coordinated care? That is interoperability’s real value — and its original promise.

*Jennifer Beer is Product Executive at Telstra Health.

Top image credit: iStock.com/Noko LTD