By Anupriyo Chakravarti, Chief Technology & Product Officer at Verisma
June 11, 2026
The quest for, and expectation of, interoperability is decades old – but it unfortunately has devolved into little more than a buzzword. Some healthcare leaders and vendors mistake the development of integrations, or connections, for genuine interoperability.
Consider the universe of Apple devices. If you’ve the lightning connector for Apple, you can connect to 10 million Apple products. But only about 20 percent of the devices in the world are Apple. So, you cannot claim to be fully interoperable across the breadth of consumer electronics.
This concept applies to so-called healthcare information technology (IT) interoperability as well. Developers can create an Epic application programming interface (API) to talk to Epic systems, for instance. Is it integrated? Yes. Is it interoperable? No, because they cannot use that API to talk to Meditech.
ROI requires access to less common systems
To prove interoperability prowess, healthcare vendors often catalog their hundreds of connected electronic health records (EHR) and healthcare IT systems. But these lists may lack crucial access to less prominent systems and technologies – an especially important consideration for release of information (ROI) requests.
Continuity of care requests, for instance, are often straightforward, requiring only a record from recent patient visits stored in a recognized EHR accessible via fast healthcare interoperability resources (FHIR) API.
But what if the request is from an attorney? You have a subpoena for a broad range of information. You might have to get dental records, mental health history, images, scanned documents, or archived records. It’s unlikely they’re available via the most common integrations or connections.
Connect to anything, to deliver everything
These situations require something beyond common integrations: A more universal protocol connecting to anything to deliver everything. Verisma Universal Connector™ matches specific tools – i.e., direct integration, robotic process automation, manual acquisition, and custom retrieval outside of standard pathways – with the clients’ technology environment.
Powered by agentic AI, Verisma Universal Connector enables teams to access information in common and noncertified technologies – like dental records or clinical archives, and back-end operations such as billing and claims systems.
Despite many vendors’ interoperability claims, the quest for superior data access, retrieval, and ROI delivery can be fulfilled only when a vendor meets the customer where they are – whether they use enterprise systems like Oracle and Epic or a homegrown EHR.
The next time a vendor tells you they’re interoperable, ask what happens when the request includes dental records from 2007. That’s what truly matters.
Read more about the shortfalls in interoperability claims, and the universal connections Verisma employs to fulfill ROI requests: Looking Beyond Claims of Interoperability.