In this episode

Mike Cordeiro has spent his career advocating for better healthcare information exchange in the United States and beyond. At MEDITECH, he’s a leading voice for EHRs and technology companies in healthcare and beyond partnering – not siloing – to improve healthcare experiences. In this session, he discuss MEDITECH’s approach to data exchange and his goals for interoperability. He outlined three major recommendations for continued improvements to interoperability:

• Proactively participate in and leverage interoperability frameworks as an opportunity, not just a regulatory burden.
• Commit to collaboration, whether you’re a health system, EHR vendor, or other health IT vendor.
• Go beyond just exchanging to using the data – and for EHRs, reduce barriers to innovation for other vendors.

“We’ve seen [interoperability] grow from a pilot to the industry using it nationally, adding technology that improves it further. Ultimately, it solves problems not just for patients, but for the health system.”

– Mike Cordeiro

 

Key takeaways

Interoperability regulation shows the potential when standards are created and leveraged.

“When I first started off doing interfaces in 2009, it was kind of this extra thing that people didn’t quite understand…and as data became more powerful, interoperability started to grow as a concept,” said Cordeiro. “And reflecting, one of the things that made interop blossom was actually government getting involved and saying, ‘You should all exchange data. A patient shall have access to their data using an app of their choosing. We’re creating these national frameworks.'”

He acknowledged that “Folks talk about government being involved as sometimes a barrier in that, you know, we’re just trying to meet regulations and check boxes.” But he encourages peers that “we as the health IT community should really be looking at what those regulations are, and what those mandates are, and actually leveraging them and and and using them to help advance tech.”

He provided an example of MEDITECH’s philosophy on data exchange: “What we’re trying to do here is take structured documents, put them into a FHIR construct, and use them more meaningfully instead of just checking a box saying ‘I pushed a document [to another system].”

All boats rise when vendors collaborate and commit to exchanging data with one another.

Cordeiro noted that to create better APIs and interoperability capabilities, in addition to following data exchange standards, vendors can work collaboratively for better outcomes. He recommends “having an environment where we can actually test and prototype with the vendor community and work collaboratively.”

“There needs to be back and forth collaboration on kind of what the big picture is, because it’s a continued evolution,” said Cordeiro.

He notes that co-creating an API or innovating on a use case with a vendor pays off even beyond a specific partnership. “[When we’re working with a vendor like Luma on a new API,] this isn’t an API specific to Luma and MEDITECH. It’s the API for how we’ll do provider-patient messaging on a specific topic. It’s not just MEDITECH coding in a silo and saying, ‘Okay, now you must use this the way it is.’ It’s actually collaborating…relative to the use case. We try to work as a community and not MEDITECH in a bubble dictating to others.”

Interoperability’s next phase: not just exchanging data, but using it to solve pain points.

“I’m hoping what 2025, 2026 will bring is wide-scale adoption of this national exchange framework beyond structured documents – ultimately leveraging the trust element of these networks to not just share data at scale, but use it,” said Cordeiro.

He noted that it will be important for EHRs to take a collaborative approach to make more interoperability advancements happen. “At MEDITECH, we wanted to develop an ecosystem that would allow innovation,” he said. “Our EHR isn’t a closed-box EHR, but a platform, and we know that health systems need to build on that platform. If we were to put cost barriers in for app developers to innovate…no one really wins there. The right thing is to have an innovation platform, and that’s what we do.”