Why True Interoperability in Health IT Is a People Problem, Not a Tech Problem

August 11, 2026 - 12:04

Ben Stevenson from Altera Digital Health has a straightforward message for the industry: the hardest part of making health IT systems work together was never the software itself. Writing code, building APIs, and connecting databases are solvable engineering challenges. The real friction, he argues, lives in the messy, human world of workflow design, governance, and organizational culture.

Stevenson's point is that seamless data exchange only matters if the people on the ground actually trust it and know how to use it. A perfectly integrated system fails if a nurse still has to log into three different screens to get a patient's history, or if a physician bypasses the clinical decision support because it slows them down. The goal is not just technical connectivity but operational harmony, where the technology fades into the background and lets clinicians focus on care.

That means health IT has to be designed around how a hospital actually works, not the other way around. Stevenson emphasizes that interoperability should be a whole-organisation strategy, not a project for the IT department. It requires clinical leaders, administrators, and vendors to agree on shared standards for data quality, patient matching, and alert fatigue. It also demands honest conversations about who owns the data and how it flows across departments, from radiology to pharmacy to billing.

In the end, the measure of success is simple: does the system make life easier for the user? If the answer is no, then no amount of clever software will save it. The hard part, as Stevenson sees it, is aligning the incentives, habits, and expectations of everyone involved so that the technology serves the mission, not the other way around. That is a challenge no algorithm can solve on its own.