We have put a lot of time into discussing the necessity of health data sharing throughout the world of healthcare. But what are the practicalities of this? We reached out to our insightful Healthcare IT Today Community to ask — what does the future of health data sharing look like? The following are their answers.
Rahul Sharma, CEO at HSBlox
The future of healthcare will be defined by our ability to share data seamlessly, and TEFCA is laying the groundwork for that transformation. True interoperability is the foundation for personalized, proactive care, improved population health, and smarter business models. But we must confront the real barriers of legacy systems, information blocking, and inconsistent standards. The organizations that succeed will be those that treat data as a strategic asset, invest in FHIR-based, TEFCA-aligned architectures, and build trust through secure, patient-centered exchange. Organizations that treat data as a strategic asset, not just a regulatory burden, will be the ones to unlock real-time insights and deliver smarter, connected care.
Hamad Husainy, DO, FACEP, CMO of Acute & Payer at PointClickCare
The future of health data sharing depends on seamless, secure interoperability —enabling the right data to flow effortlessly across systems wherever it’s needed for care. Adoption of frameworks like TEFCA and Carequality helps break down silos and enable instant, nationwide health information exchange, ensuring that data is shared responsibly. True interoperability unlocks insights to improve patient outcomes and operational efficiency, while always centering the patient’s interests, privacy, and well-being
Brendan Smith-Elion, VP, Product Management at Arcadia
The future of health data sharing lies in FHIR-native, bulk data exchange at scale, where every endpoint, from providers and payers to public health APIs, speaks FHIR fluently. As an industry, we’ve advanced from basic interoperability, or the capability for systems to send data to each other, to syntactic interoperability, where data flows in a standards-based format or structure. We’re now advancing to semantic interoperability, where systems move data in a way that maintains clinical meaning across systems. In other words, the ability interprets the meaning of exchanged data in the same way.
While the industry has evolved from basic to syntactic and now semantic interoperability, we still face a critical gap: translating between local implementations and standardized clinical concepts. True interoperability requires more than just exchanging documents or raw FHIR resources; it demands intelligent transformation that preserves clinical intent and context. Making this future possible requires enriching FHIR data with clinical context and building connections between systems to ensure the meaning stays intact as data moves. Technology isn’t the barrier, as FHIR provides the foundation. The real challenges are semantic alignment and workflow integration. Many organizations use different value sets and documentation templates, resulting in inconsistencies and loss of clinical meaning. To overcome this, healthcare organizations must adopt FHIR as a native model, invest in semantic mapping infrastructure, and standardize clinical documentation practices across care settings.
Wayne Walker, Senior Vice President at Medidata
The future of health data sharing is rooted in secure, scalable frameworks that promote seamless exchange of information across clinical, research, and patient-generated data sources. One area in which this is particularly impactful is in clinical trials, where real-time data sharing between sponsors, sites, contract research organizations, and other relevant stakeholders can accelerate study timelines, improve protocol adherence, and enable earlier identification of the safety or efficacy of therapies. When clinical trial data is shared efficiently and responsibly, it empowers researchers to make more informed decisions, ultimately bringing therapies to patients faster.
True interoperability is still challenged by fragmented standards, outdated IT systems, and concerns over data privacy. Overcoming these barriers requires organizations to adopt open APIs, leverage cloud-based platforms, and collaborate on industry-wide data standards. The government should set clear standards and regulatory guidelines for data sharing, while the industry should lead in developing technologies to promote data sharing with embedded security. Ultimately, robust data sharing is not just a technical goal, but a critical driver of better, faster patient care.
Abhi Gupta, Co-Founder and CEO at Fold Health
The future of health data sharing won’t be defined by better pipes alone—it requires smarter infrastructure and a reinvention of the outdated tooling that makes data usable and effective. We can’t keep overhauling standards while ignoring what is and will be required of the systems and workflows meant to operationalize them. Truly solving for the future of interoperability means rethinking not just how data moves, but how it’s activated—through the systems, workflows, and tools that make that data valuable in the moments that matter.
Emerging approaches like the Model Context Protocol (MCP), paired with infrastructure purpose-built to interpret and act in real-time, represent the next wave of actionable interoperability—where shared data becomes shared intelligence in motion.
Donald Rucker, MD, Chief Strategy Officer at 1upHealth
The future of health data sharing stands at a crossroads. It could embrace modern technologies such as RESTful APIs, FHIR, and public key cryptography, which would enable computation, competition, and patient control. It could also risk pivoting back to obsolete protocols like TEFCA, which encourages information blocking by binding our data to inefficient brokers and fax-like data formats, while missing modern security and privacy principles. At this pivotal time, health plans and the industry as a whole must press on and remain committed to achieving the future vision of mutually beneficial data sharing and better healthcare for patients.
Mariann Yeager, CEO at The Sequoia Project
The future of health data sharing is vibrant. We will see a tremendous growth in trusted exchange, as well as expanding exchange to make it easier for consumers to access their information. I like to think of this as the year of the consumer. We’ll also see the adoption and rollout of FHIR-based exchange at a nationwide level. I think this is very exciting. In addition, we’ll see payers more engaged in nationwide trust frameworks.
Karin Hayes, Senior Vice President, Analytics Products and Services at OptimizeRx
The future of health data sharing is shifting toward intelligent, privacy-first orchestration, enabling life sciences companies to engage healthcare providers and their patient populations in a secure, compliant, and highly relevant way. Powered by de-identified, real-world data and AI-driven insights, along with connected and compliant engagement platforms, this evolution is enabling life science companies to enhance healthcare provider-patient interactions and activate meaningful, timely communications across care settings and media channels.
With HIPAA-compliant data and AI, healthcare marketers are able to customize media plans based on real-world clinical insights and market events, but data sharing will remain essential in ensuring data insights are activated across point-of-care systems, EHRs, and programmatic media to deliver relevant content at the right moments. By enabling the compliant activation of de-identified data, clinical, IT, and commercial teams can unlock engagement strategies that are personalized, measurable, high-performing, and built to scale.
Stuart Long, CEO at InfoBionic.Ai
The future of health data sharing is one of seamless, secure, and patient-driven exchange. As interoperability improves and technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and cloud platforms continue to mature, health data will be able to flow freely between systems—empowering patients and enabling more responsive, coordinated care by providers.
Central to this transformation is the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA), which is creating a unified, nationwide health information exchange. At its core are Qualified Health Information Networks (QHINs) that work together to share bi-directional data across providers, payers, and innovators.
As TEFCA matures and Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standards advance, hospitals will be able to gain a single, standardized on-ramp to access complete longitudinal records—like labs, imaging, medications, and near real-time device data—in seconds. AI can surface the most relevant signals, while patient-facing APIs will allow individuals to securely share their full health history with any care team.
Ultimately, this shift may eventually empower an AI-driven ecosystem where raw data becomes near real-time clinical insight—improving clinical decision-making, care coordination, and patient outcomes.
Eddie Qureshi, Founder and CEO at Rainfall Health
The future of health data sharing is patient-triggered, AI-enabled, and compliance-first. We’re moving toward a model where information flows automatically based on clinical need, not at the sole behest of the patient—but with clear guardrails that protect hospital autonomy and the proprietary value of their data.
So many great insights here! Huge thank you to everyone who took the time out of their day to submit a quote to us! And thank you to all of you for taking the time out of your day to read this article! We could not do this without all of your support.
What do you think the future of health data sharing looks like? Let us know over on social media, we’d love to hear from all of you!
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