Healthcare interoperability benefits appear in everyday care moments, when clinicians need a complete picture to make safe decisions and patients need care that feels coordinated rather than confusing.
In 2023, about 70% of U.S. hospitals reported that they at least sometimes engage in all four core domains of interoperable exchange, up sharply from earlier years. Yet only about 43% of hospitals said they routinely engage in all four domains, which means a significant share still has gaps in consistent data sharing.
The 2024 KLAS EHR Interoperability Report highlights that many leaders and clinicians cite weak external integration and difficulty using outside data as a top barrier to getting full value from health IT investments.
The work to fix interoperability is ongoing, and the financial benefits may be monumental.
Walker and colleagues at the Center for Information Technology Leadership estimated that fully standardized health information exchange and interoperability could generate roughly 77.8 billion dollars in net value each year once fully implemented.
Core interoperability benefits include fewer duplicate tests, fewer adverse events, and greater administrative efficiency. Against that backdrop, interoperability benefits are a clinical, operational, and strategic requirement for safer, faster, more connected patient care.
What Is Healthcare Interoperability?
Healthcare interoperability means that different systems can exchange information and use it meaningfully. Achieving real interoperability benefits depend on more than moving a PDF or fax image from one organization to another.
Clinicians need data that arrives quickly, fits into their workflow, and appears in a format the receiving system can incorporate into the chart. When that happens, decision support, analytics, and patient-facing tools can all build on the same reliable foundation.
The Four Levels of Interoperability
Experts often describe four levels of interoperability: foundational, structural, semantic, and organizational.
- Foundational interoperability means two systems can establish a connection and exchange data at a basic, transport level.
- Structural interoperability ensures that exchanged data follows a defined format and structure so the receiving system can parse the information correctly.
- Semantic interoperability means systems interpret the data the same way, using shared vocabularies and coding, so clinical meaning is preserved across settings.
- Organizational interoperability aligns policies, incentives, and governance so organizations can share and use information appropriately, with clear rules around access and consent.
Most interoperability benefits for patient care emerge at the semantic and organizational levels, where problem lists, allergies, medications, and results carry consistent meaning across systems and where governance supports responsible data use.
Regulatory and Industry Drivers
Policy keeps raising the floor for interoperability performance. The 21st Century Cures Act directed HHS and ONC to advance interoperability, define information blocking, and support patients’ access to their electronic health information.
ONC’s Cures Act Final Rule requires that patients can electronically access all of their electronic health information in a form they can use, often via apps of their choice.
The same law defines information blocking as practices that interfere with, prevent, or materially discourage access, exchange, or use of electronic health information, except where a recognized exception applies.
In 2024, HHS finalized a companion rule establishing financial disincentives for certain Medicare-participating health care providers who commit information blocking.
TEFCA, the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement, adds a national “network of networks” layer, with Qualified Health Information Networks (QHINs) designated to provide trusted cross-network exchange under a common technical and governance framework.
Interoperability Benefits at the Point of Care
Shortcomings in external integration are still one of the lowest-rated aspects of clinicians’ EHR experience. When organizations close this gap, the most visible interoperability benefits appear at the bedside and in the exam room.
A Complete, Longitudinal View of the Patient
Interoperability allows clinicians to see a consolidated view of problems, medications, allergies, test results, and notes across care settings. Instead of piecing together the story from patient memory or scattered PDFs, the care team sees how conditions and treatments evolve over time.
Research on fragmented hospital readmissions among Medicare beneficiaries has shown that fragmented readmissions are associated with less favorable discharge destinations and that shared electronic information exchange can improve discharge outcomes.
When clinicians gain a longitudinal view, interoperability benefits include more accurate histories, fewer missed diagnoses, and more confidence when adjusting complex treatment plans.
Faster, More Accurate Diagnosis and Treatment
Systematic reviews of health information exchange have linked HIE participation to reductions in duplicate testing and improvements in some utilization and cost outcomes.
In 2024, Epic Research reported that interoperability-driven imaging alerts identified 3.2 million prevented duplicate orders and an additional 2.6 million potentially prevented orders, for a total of more than 5.8 million imaging exams avoided or likely avoided in one year, reducing unnecessary radiation and cost.
These safety-focused interoperability benefits reduce unnecessary testing and support more appropriate use of resources.
Faster access to outside labs, imaging, and consult notes can shorten the path to diagnosis and reduce “come back next visit” delays that frustrate patients and providers.
Stronger Care Coordination and Transitions of Care
Discharge and referral workflows reveal another set of interoperability benefits. When hospitals send structured discharge summaries, medication lists, and follow-up plans electronically to primary care, home health, and specialty teams, everyone works from the same playbook.
National frameworks like TEFCA are beginning to make cross-network exchange more routine by enabling standardized, trusted networks for clinical data sharing.
As transitions become smoother, interoperability benefits include fewer gaps in care, better adherence to follow-up, and less confusion for patients and caregivers during high-risk moments.
Interoperability Benefits for Patient Experience and Engagement
Patients feel the greatest benefit from interoperability when everything “just works” behind the scenes. They schedule visits, see results, and move between providers without repeating the same story or chasing records.
Less Friction in Everyday Healthcare Tasks
Many patients still hand-carry CDs, repeat forms at every visit, or wait days for records to move between providers.
As recently as 2018, about seven in ten U.S. non-federal acute care hospitals continued to use mail or fax for sending and receiving summary of care records.
Stronger interoperability removes some of this friction. When systems share schedules, referrals, and results, patients spend less time on paperwork and more time on meaningful conversations. They can book appointments, view results, and message care teams through familiar digital tools, rather than navigating a maze of forms and phone trees.
Supporting Equity and Complex Care Needs
Patients with complex conditions or multiple chronic diseases often receive care from multiple organizations over long periods.
Without interoperable systems, they shoulder much of the burden of coordinating their history. Research on heterogeneous health information systems shows that lack of interoperability leads to redundant, disorganized, and inaccessible information, undermining safety and outcomes.
For these patients, interoperability benefits include fewer missed referrals, better follow-up on abnormal results, and consistent care plans across urban, rural, and community-based settings.
Stronger Trust and Transparency in Care
Patients are more likely to trust teams that communicate clearly and give them visibility into their own information.
Interoperability benefits support that trust by making it simple to see who has accessed records, how information is shared, and what the care plan looks like across organizations. That transparency helps patients feel like true partners, not bystanders, in decisions that affect their health.
Practical Steps to Realize Interoperability Benefits
Achieving interoperability benefits requires leaders to prioritize specific use cases, choose the right technical pathways, and align governance so teams know when and how to use shared data.
It is as much a change management effort as a technology project, with clear owners, timelines, and success metrics that keep everyone pulling in the same direction.
Identify High-Value Use Cases First
Successful teams start where interoperability benefits are easiest to see and measure.
Common high-value use cases include ED-to-outpatient transitions, hospital discharge to home health or skilled nursing, specialist referrals, sharing of imaging and lab results, chronic disease management programs, and release of information to outside providers and payers.
Each use case should directly tie to patient outcomes, experience, or a clear operational pain point, such as duplicate testing, delayed discharges, or missed follow-up.
Map Current Workflows and Pain Points
Next, leaders map how information actually moves today.
- Who requests records, from where, and in what format?
- Where do requests stall or go missing?
- Which steps still rely on fax, mail, or scanned uploads?
This exercise often exposes another barrier to interoperability benefits: inconsistent patient matching and identity resolution across systems. Many hospitals report difficulty matching or identifying the correct patient when exchanging with external partners.
Benefits become easier to explain when leaders can point to specific delays, bottlenecks, and manual work that better connectivity and matching could remove.
Choose the Right Interoperability Pathways
No single technology delivers all interoperability benefits. Most organizations combine direct EHR-to-EHR interfaces, participation in regional or national HIEs, FHIR-based APIs, and vendor-neutral exchanges.
ONC and other national bodies emphasize that interoperable systems can help clinicians avoid duplicate tests, make timelier decisions, and give patients intuitive tools to schedule visits and view results.
Leaders should prioritize pathways that embed external data in existing workflows, support semantic interoperability, and align with their broader data governance strategy.
Governance, Privacy, and Security
Interoperability benefits must align with strong governance. HIM, compliance, IT, and clinical operations teams should define who can access which data, under what legal basis, and with which safeguards.
Policies should reinforce HIPAA’s minimum necessary standard while honoring the Cures Act requirement to avoid unreasonable barriers to access and exchange.
Clear governance and auditing give clinicians confidence that they can share information with trusted partners in a compliant way and help the organization respond to regulators or auditors who review how data moves.
Measure and Communicate Results
Teams should also track metrics that show interoperability benefits over time.
- Clinical metrics can include medication discrepancies at admission and discharge, duplicate test rates, avoidable admissions, and readmissions.
- Experience metrics can track portal adoption, referral delays, and patient complaints about record access.
- Operational metrics can capture time to fulfill record requests, fax volume, and staff hours spent on manual retrieval.
Systematic reviews and EHR-based intervention studies have linked better data exchange and EHR-enabled interventions to measurable improvements in utilization, discharge outcomes, and readmission risk.
Connecting Interoperability Benefits to Release of Information (ROI)
The release of information touches patients, referring providers, health plans, attorneys, and patients. If ROI workflows remain paper-heavy, slow, or inconsistent, they can undermine interoperability benefits by introducing delays and uncertainty when data needs to move.
Bringing ROI into your interoperability strategy helps close this last-mile gap so that records flow as reliably outside of your organization as they do inside.
Why ROI Is Part of the Interoperability Story
Even with strong EHR integrations, many external stakeholders still receive information through ROI workflows. These stakeholders include referring providers, payers, attorneys, and patients.
The Cures Act information blocking rules apply here as well, requiring organizations to avoid unnecessary barriers to access, exchange, and use of electronic health information.
When ROI processes are slow, manual, or inconsistent, they erode many upstream interoperability benefits by delaying data at the last mile.
Automating ROI to Strengthen Interoperability
Modern ROI automation platforms extend interoperability benefits beyond the four walls of the EHR. They support digital request intake, standardized workflows, and electronic delivery that integrate with existing systems through secure interfaces and APIs.
These tools provide status visibility for staff and requestors, enforce consistent policies, and maintain complete audit logs. Platforms like ChartRequest automate intake, routing, and digital fulfillment while connecting to EHRs and HIEs, so ROI no longer sits outside your interoperability strategy.
The result is shorter turnaround times, fewer lost requests, and more predictable access for outside clinicians who rely on timely records to guide care.
Preparing for Audits, Information Blocking, and Patient Rights
Automated ROI workflows also create interoperability benefits for compliance. Detailed logs show when an organization received a request, which legal basis applied, how staff processed it, and when they fulfilled it.
These records support audits related to HIPAA, the Cures Act, and payer contracts. Clear documentation also helps organizations respond to complaints about information access and information blocking.
In a tighter regulatory climate, these benefits reduce risk and build trust with patients, partners, and regulators.
Turning Interoperability Benefits into Everyday Practice
Interoperability benefits span every layer of modern healthcare. Behind the scenes, interoperable systems reduce administrative burden, strengthen analytics, lower costs, and improve compliance with evolving federal rules.
By digitizing and automating release of information workflows, ChartRequest helps providers connect internal records with the outside organizations that need them, while maintaining strong governance, auditability, and patient access.
When you align ROI with your broader interoperability strategy, you extend interoperability benefits to every stakeholder who depends on timely, accurate records.
If you are ready to move beyond isolated projects and design an end-to-end approach that turns interoperability benefits into everyday practice, schedule a consultation with ChartRequest.
