Not short on software — short on a shared view
Most healthcare organizations aren’t short on software — they’re short on a shared, trustworthy view of the patient across the EHR, the lab system, the pharmacy, and whatever specialty system a given department has bolted on. HL7v2 feeds and point-to-point interfaces were built to move messages, not to create a coherent data model, and every new system added to that landscape adds another translation layer that can silently drift out of sync.
FHIR reshapes the problem more than it solves it
FHIR gives teams a common resource model and a real API surface, but it doesn’t resolve the underlying data governance question: who owns the canonical patient record, and what happens when two systems disagree about a medication list. Solving that requires a dedicated interoperability layer — a service whose only job is reconciling and exposing clinical data consistently — rather than another integration wedged into the EHR itself.
Treat interoperability as a platform, not a project
Organizations that treat interoperability as its own platform investment, with its own roadmap and its own team, consistently ship connected-care features faster than those that treat every new integration as a one-off project.