Interoperability is a Business Risk for Medtech and a Healthcare Risk for Patients

Looking at patient experience and healthcare interoperability in the medtech environment, any observer (customer experience expert or not) recognizes something is broken. A thorough exploration of what is broken exposes fundamental gaps the average observer (including patients) might miss. We know providers face high levels of burnout and patients report low levels of satisfaction. Less obvious is that a root cause of common healthcare experience problems is the disconnect between technology tools and human processes. Namely, challenges with interoperability.

Within the patient journey, interoperability, the connectedness of data and information systems across the continuum of care, breaks when human processes that interface with the technology are not designed to support patient experience.

My Interoperability Patient Experience Story

Recently, I watched this failure unfold in real time while seeking basic health services for my child. Two healthcare institutions, both of whom report to be “interoperable,” could not complete a simple information transfer. Why? Because the receiving institution relies on fax machines. Still. In 2026. And not only fax machines. Fax machines monitored by one documentation staff member who works one 7:30 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. shift.

If you are following along, you know what is coming. A fax arrives outside the 7:30 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. window (but still during the practice’s operating hours, not to mention a standard business day). It waits. If the employee whose job it is to monitor the fax machine is out of the office for two days, that fax waits longer. And, if the workflow requires that employee to manually route the fax, the entire chain of care stalls until their return.

The scenario I have described above is not rightly called a technology failure. It is a failure of ownership of a key moment on the patient experience journey. And the cause of significant, avoidable, disruptions to the patient experience journey. As such, it is the exact type of experience failure medtech companies are positioned to solve. But only if they align with the patient journey. And only if their customers (healthcare providers) build the right processes.

The Interoperability Paradox: Network Works; Workflow Breaks

Federal interoperability infrastructure is expanding rapidly. More than 9,200 organizations now participate in the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA), a national framework for health information sharing established by the United States Department of Health & Human Services Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC). TEFCA’s mission aligns with a patient-first mindset. Its stated purpose is “to remove barriers for sharing health records electronically among healthcare providers, patients, public health agencies, and payers.”

On a mission level, this is great news for experience practitioners and patient advocates. In practice, the gap between goals and execution remains. Patient experience lives in that gap.

Back to those 9,200 organizations. They represent more than 41,000 connections. And a jump in annual document exchange volume from around 10 million prior to 2025 to 464 million by the end of 2025, according to the ONC. The foundation has been laid. People and processes do not connect to it. Case in point, 88% of healthcare practitioners say fax‑related delays, like the scenario we described, continue to actively affect patient care as recently as October 2025.

While interoperability failures translate to problems for patient experience, customer experience experts are not the only ones who recognize the challenge. Healthcare leaders describe interoperability as a “productivity tax.” They note it drags down operations. And low-tech issues like reliance on fax machines persist, even though clinical capabilities advance.

Why is Healthcare Failing?

Technology accelerates what a process enables. So, by extension, if the process is broken, technology accelerates that break.

The root question here is, how does this accelerated breakdown take place? It is the result of strained linkages within an overall healthcare environment weakened by internal fractures, as well as pressures and external conditions that burden already-taxed systems.

Not the least of which is the human element of a reduced number of providers for an increasingly aging (high-need) population. According to a 2024 report produced by the American Association of Medical Colleges, the US faces a projected physician shortage of up to 86,000 by 2036. That is ten years away. The Commonwealth Fund reports, nearly 100 million Americans lack a regular source of primary care.

We are running out of time to fix the human-technology fractures that threaten patient experience and healthcare sector employee experience.

That is the big picture of the healthcare environment. Let’s take a closer look at the impact on patient experience. And the ways in which fractures between medtech design and human systems design amplify negative patient experience. Communication failures now factor into 40% of malpractice claims. In hospital settings, delayed information contributes to $2,500–$3,100 lost bed‑days per patient.

With fewer clinicians, fewer facilities, and fewer available resources, every unowned handoff becomes a risk event.

Interoperability is Not a Technology Problem

The instinct to solve the healthcare interoperability problem exclusively at the technology level is incorrect. Interoperability, and the seamless experience it should be calibrated to support, requires a seamless handoff to humans in the health system who interface with it and deliver experiences to their patients. When no one owns that handoff, as we witness in practice time and again, interoperability breaks. And so do patient and provider experiences.

While the medtech companies we work with are B2B companies, they understand their success hinges on predictable, positive patient and provider experience. The companies who work with us share the goal of improving patient and provider experience. Achieving that goal is a challenge that requires robust customer experience strategy to mitigate experience risk.

In that vein, through our work, when we come into a medtech company that does not yet have the right customer experience strategy or processes and procedures in place, we encounter four distinct patterns. These patterns precipitate the breakdown of interoperability and the subsequent fractures along the patient experience journey.

Causes of Patient Experience Journey Fractures

• Gaps between implementation and customer experience. In this scenario, onboarding teams set up connections and customer success teams inherit those connections without documented handoffs.
• Friction between IT and Operations. Here, we often see both sides claim responsibility for execution, with neither owning it fully. When something breaks, it remains broken.
• Churn and renewal risk. This scenario is from the customer experience perspective. It demonstrates the impact of negative experiences on medtech companies that promise seamlessness, and suffer when that seamlessness is impossible to deliver. All too often, the first visible sign of an unowned handoff is a customer saying they do not plan to renew.
• Manual workarounds mask exposure. Here, we are back to those faxes. Also, spreadsheets and one‑off calls that frontline employees use to hide the gaps in patient experience until escalation forces it into view. Which often happens too late.

In short, this is why interoperability fails even when the technology itself works. The workflow is fragile because ownership is informal, undocumented, and dependent on individuals who often lack the training to use the technology. Or are forced into workflow patterns that undermine the technology and its design intent to support patient experience.

How Interoperability Failures Hit Medtech Vendors

Right now, interoperability ownership lives nowhere on paper. It lives in one person’s memory of how things are usually done. That is why the flow breaks the moment one person is out sick, changes roles, or the company scales past the point where only one person can do it all. Mapping what actually happens, assigning a name to the owner of each step, and building that ownership so it survives turnover and growth fixes the operational gap. We do not solve this operational problem more technology. Rather, we solve it by assigning the handoff an owner.

I want to take a moment to look more closely at the real risk medtech companies face when interoperability breaks. Again, we are not talking about a feel good vs. feel bad outcome. We are talking about real experiences and threats to a company’s viability.

When interoperability fails, it can result in blocking patient access to data, for which penalties can reach $1 million per violation. As of this year, certified health-IT developers are receiving letters of nonconformity. Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services, Jim O’Neill, explains the rationale: “[u]nblocking the flow of health information is critical to unleashing health IT innovation and transforming our healthcare ecosystem.”  He continues, “[w]e will take appropriate action against any health care actors who are found to be blocking health data for patients, caregivers, providers, health innovators, and others.”

Further, interoperability is now a named M&A due‑diligence category. Boards and investors are scrutinizing interoperability readiness ahead of raises, expansions, and acquisitions. The importance of getting interoperability right cannot be understated.

So, let’s jump back to my initial story about the fax in this light. The fax that sat unanswered for two days is an event a malpractice database records as a communication failure; a due diligence team records as an interoperability red flag; and leadership records as an unmanaged risk.

For our medtech clients, this is where we protect them, by safeguarding not only the patient’s experience, but the provider’s operation.

How Customer Experience Solves the Problem

Customer experience maps actual workflow, identifies precise moments where information stalls (and that effect on the patient journey). It also uncovers hidden dependencies and failure points. Ultimately, the customer experience lens reveals how operational frictions translate to patient friction.

At the end of the day, when we apply the customer experience discipline to healthcare interoperability, we force leaders to see who owns what, when. And how to build processes around that ownership to improve patient journeys. We solve for interoperability as a human problem, not a technology problem by applying human-centered approaches to human challenges.

Because we see workflow as the patient experiences it, as well as how the team responsible for delivering the experience sees it, we design processes that make the technology worthwhile – and workable – for provider and patient.

Create Human‑Centered Processes that Support Growth

To sum it up, because technology does not create the break in interoperability, more technology does not fix it. Documented ownership of every handoff, designed from the perspective of the people who actually move the information, fixes it.

As such, for scaling medtech companies, the same three moves address the problem:

1. Map the real handoffs

Process mapping uncovers the real workflow lived by documentation teams, clinicians, and partner institutions. It exposes the specific points where interoperability collapses.

2. Design and assign ownership

Human-centered process design assigns clear ownership for every handoff. This eliminates the ambiguity that generates churn, compliance exposure, and deal risk.

3. Build ownership to holds under growth

Training, governance, and monitoring ensure the workflow survives turnover, expansion, and new partner‑institution connections.

This is process and governance closing the experience gap technology cannot. And it is how The Petrova Experience delivers process and governance solutions to scaling medtech organizations. We help make the workflow clear, ownership explicit, and interoperability reliable.

What Medtech Leaders Need Now

If your company is scaling, integrating, or preparing for a raise, acquisition, or expansion, you cannot afford undocumented handoffs. Nor can you afford ownership gaps. What you need is interoperability that works regardless of who is on shift (or off shift!).

Recognize that medtech buyers from provider networks to hospital systems are operating inside a strained system with no margin for error. They need partners whose workflows are as reliable and well designed as their technology.

Interoperability delivers on its promises when the human processes around it are clearly defined and reliably orchestrated. Customer experience, as a discipline with operational insight and impact, enables medtech to deliver consistently on those promises.

Are you ready to deliver? Talk with us.