How Healthcare Interoperability Companies are Transforming Healthcare

The CDC now reports that 90% of the health labs they support engage in electronic health data exchange. This statistic represents a significant increase from previous years, indicating that digital interoperability remains a vital component in the healthcare industry and that healthcare interoperability companies can continue to thrive despite ongoing regulatory updates.

Businesses like Iron Bridge already handle national vaccine and ELR traffic and are ready to integrate higher-speed data standards. But what else is happening in the industry to push healthcare forward that you might want to be aware of?

Below, we discuss concepts like:

• Upcoming interoperability deadlines to be aware of
• How cloud FHIR façades can help you avoid costly replacements
• Why AI-driven validation can save you from invalid-data rejections
• Use cases for more interoperability

Read on to ensure your system remains up-to-date moving forward and discover how Iron Bridge can make this process even easier.

2025 Interoperability Deadlines to Be Aware Of

Starting in 2025, many more healthcare networks have begun setting up secure web services known as Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) to facilitate the transmission and reception of larger data batches than ever before. These require secure REST endpoints and SMART tokens to help those accessing prove who they are, continuing a long tradition of security with HIPAA-protected documentation in health information networks.

Working with companies like Iron Bridge, you can assume that it can already handle everything FHIR requires, so you do not need to worry about rebuilding your old systems and instead plug into our API to get everything done with the minimum of fuss.

The new HTI-1 rule also makes specific data fields, such as USCDI v3, mandatory, while ensuring clear rules exist for the use of AI in decision-making for all certified electronic health records and systems. AI decision-making is likely to become more standard moving forward, and we have already seen peer-reviewed analyses, such as that by Chua et al. (2025), which suggest that AI-supported decision-making can significantly reduce patient harm. As such, having these transparent rules will become an increasingly important step moving forward.

These changes impact every certified EHR technology vendor, requiring updates to software on a large scale. Skipping out on this change will not only leave you behind, but you may also lose our certification regarding interoperability. Therefore, ensure that you have a system in place that can quickly convert your old HL7 data into new FHIR messages.

Consequence-Based Deadlines

Another change is that the OIG can now fine both healthcare IT companies and individual actors up to $1 million per instance in which a company blocks access to healthcare information, as outlined in the 21st Century Cures Act. As such, this shifts the responsibility for compliance from the IT managers to the board, increasing its priority to those who make the decisions in a company. As such, we can expect changes to occur faster, driven from the top.

However, while both California and New York are piloting new bidirectional FHIR systems in 2025, Texas continues to mandate the use of older HL7 v2 messages. As these changes on both coasts aim to boost data transfer speeds and facilitate all healthcare decision-making, Texas's stance means that you may fall foul of the 21st Century Cures Act if you do not support both systems simultaneously.

These two legacy systems mean you will need to start slowing down updates, as quality assurance processes and development must account for all possibilities. Therefore, it may be wise to ensure that your budgets account for these upgrades before software contractors start to increase their rates with surge pricing once key deadlines begin to take effect.

If you haven't updated for these different lines of development, you may already be falling behind. Start the process before it's too late, or work with a partner who can offer the software to do it for you.

High-Impact Use Cases

It is essential to understand many of the ways in which you can utilize this technology to ensure that your records continue to be not only helpful but also increase in usefulness moving forward. With the ability to quickly and securely access a patient's information or compare it to other records, you can make more accurate decisions. At the same time, you spend less time on paperwork in the long term.

For example, healthcare workers can easily query patient records such as their shot history. With this information in hand, they are less likely to accidentally give someone a second shot, thereby avoiding redundancy and potential risks that multiple or unnecessary injections could pose to a patient.

Automating Vaccine Workflows at Retail Scale

For example, our own Pub Hub can easily communicate with every state's vaccination database using a single web request. We design it so that you don't need to write different code to interact with each of the 64 different vaccination registry databases, saving you a significant amount of time.

The ease-of-use this has brought has led to statistics such as:

• 1m vaccination records submitted daily
• 1.7m daily patient searches

With this data available through multiple databases, you can perform checks to determine if various records exist for the same patient. As such, you can ensure that you always submit data for the correct patient or combine multiple sets of information into a single record for easier handling.

Built-in interoperability systems also check each database to determine when someone is due or overdue for their next shot. Your staff can then contact the patient in question to check in with them and ensure they understand their next steps. The level of patient care and personal attention this offers means that your patients are likely to think more highly of your healthcare practice without you needing to perform this task manually.

Finally, in cases where mass vaccine rollouts are necessary, such as during flu season, you can utilize systems like Iron Bridge's Pub Hub to check coverage on multiple patient records simultaneously. It can then order the vaccinations in bulk after booking in patients, helping lines move faster on busy clinic days.

Real-Time Surveillance with RapidReport

Instead of dozens of complicated code-based queries with various lab test systems across the country, Iron Bridge enables a level of interoperability that allows healthcare workers to easily set up reports without requiring coding knowledge. The process even works cross-system, preventing the need to investigate complicated APIs to handle the data.

Labs can quickly set up their own rulesets for lab codes, enabling them to go live with high-speed data. The system can then automatically mark which lab results have yet to be reported, helping staff process the data more efficiently and manage it more effectively. The sent report is also flagged internally, ensuring a level of accountability and easy auditing for managers.

Using the latest in API hooks, the end-to-end latency of data transfer can often be as low as 60 seconds. As such, doctors can receive data more quickly, which helps them when problems require rapid attention. At the same time, other groups who need the information, such as hospital infection control teams, can receive reports automatically based on a set of internal rules that flag up issues as soon as they occur.

Together, this helps both patients and doctors with faster reports, as many of the processes are handled automatically that would usually count as extra busywork.

Technology That Sets Leaders Apart

Iron Bridge Corp is a leader in ensuring that healthcare data is communicated effectively. One of the key ways we achieve this is by using an "FHIR façade." This software acts as a translator, sitting in front of your old database after you upgrade from HL7 or older systems, and initializing processes that convert one form of data into another.

If ripping out and replacing your old system is too expensive or time-consuming in the short term, this helps you maintain compliance until you manage to upgrade to something that meets regulations top-to-bottom.

You may believe that you are falling extremely far behind if you do this. However, in truth, as of January 2024, almost three-quarters of digital health firms were using standards-based EHR APIs, such as HL7 FHIR converters. As such, it appears to be a valid and accessible way for businesses to remain viable while performing the necessary analysis to upgrade their systems.

Ensuring Compatibility Between Key Systems

Interoperability systems are designed to accommodate any differences between systems by incorporating them into their rulesets. Millions of messages move through their databases and need to be translated between standards such as:

• HL7
• FHIR
• X12
• CSV

As such, intelligent mapping systems will adjust every record from one standard to another. If any incompatibilities remain, they will be flagged for manual review. However, the process significantly reduces the difficulty of transferring data from one system to another.

For systems where the issue lies in human understanding and training, competent interoperability firms will work with businesses to ensure seamless integration. Through guided support and ongoing technical assistance, you can have the assurance that your team will receive the training necessary to understand how things work moving forward and, should issues arise, know how to handle them.

FHIR Facade Versus Native Migration

The main reason this tool is so valuable is that it can work so much faster than performing the process manually. Instead of handling health information management and translating its data through manual entry, a façade can be up and running in a fraction of the time, turning one system into another without human interaction. The whole business can ensure compliance in weeks, well ahead of future deadlines.

The ability to translate the data back and forth also ensures that you can preserve existing workflows until you have time to update them. Instead of rebuilding your whole database to speak to other systems using FHIR directly, you can instead make use of a third party that others have developed as you gather the expertise to rebuild the rest of the database gradually.

How to Transform Alongside the Healthcare Industry

Before implementing everything, it is usually sensible to conduct a small-scale trial of any changes first to identify potential problems. Doing this gives you time to fix them before everyone is on board, and allows you to show compatibility with the plan.

Once you have a proof of concept in place, set up a cross-team group to ensure that you understand the requirements of all elements of the plan and how it will impact other areas of your business. For example, get buy-in from:

• Pharmacy teams
• Lab representatives
• IT support
• Compliance officers

Having cross-functional approvals and oversight like this can ensure that you have all the necessary data and understand what KPIs each team is looking for before they will buy into a rollout.

Every few weeks, work with these teams and report on the findings you have. Use this time to ask for feedback and answer any questions they may have, then inform them directly how you plan to tweak the process to reduce the work they need to do, making it easier for them. Note also that these meetings may need to be more regular at the start and end of the process, and that briefer reports may be necessary more frequently to keep everyone informed at all times.

After you have everything in place, you can then scale up to one or two low-risk sites with moderate traffic to test your setup.

You may even want to include AI systems to monitor and report on issues as they arise. Over 70% of healthcare organizations have already incorporated these interoperable healthcare solutions into their operations, and they are likely to expedite your rollout process when implemented correctly.

Drive Connected Care Forward with Healthcare Interoperability Companies

What you need to do moving forward to stay up-to-date is clear, but integrating all your systems will still take time. Healthcare interoperability companies such as Iron Bridge can solve this. With services such as Pub Hub and RapidReport, we can help you maintain compliance while providing faster responses to various healthcare reports and data analyses.

If you're ready to lead in the healthcare field, schedule a demo with Iron Bridge. We would love to show you the full scale of what we can do to help you in the second half of 2025 and beyond.