As we wrap up another year and get ready for 2026 to begin, it is once again time for everyone’s favorite annual tradition of Health IT Predictions! We reached out to our incredible Healthcare IT Today Community to get their insights on what will happen in the coming year, and boy, did they deliver. We, in fact, got so many responses to our prompt this year that we have had to narrow them down to just the best and most interesting. Check out the community’s predictions down below and be sure to follow along as we share more 2026 Health IT Predictions!
Check out our community’s Healthcare Interoperability predictions:
David Cohen, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Greenway Health
In 2026, the future of healthcare technology isn’t about layering AI tools onto inefficient workflows. It’s about creating an intelligent, connected ecosystem where AI is an intrinsic capability woven into the very fabric of the EHR to learn, adapt, and act. This is intelligence in motion: transforming interoperability into proactive performance by anticipating needs, eliminating friction, and amplifying human potential across clinical, financial, and patient engagement touchpoints
Paul Wilder, Executive Director at CommonWell Health Alliance
2026 will be the year of patient access. The market will see continued entrants, both big and small, offering solutions that build on the standards established by TEFCA, including Individual Access Services. The best solutions will be comprehensive in nature, aligned to best practices, and connected across the ecosystem to advance true interoperability.
Carla Balch, Executive Director Aranscia Software & Products, Founder, Spesana at Aranscia
To have truly coordinated healthcare, meaning a patient has all their care coordinated across all providers, an EMR+ approach is required. Few patients are treated where all their providers are on ONE EMR. For example, community providers are often not on a large EMR. Interoperability is expected; however, the real healthcare overview is NOT designed in a useful, visual way for all providers.
Angela Clubb, Senior Manager, Quality & Regulatory, Transformation & Innovation Services at Nordic
After more than a decade of work on concepts like meaningful use and interoperability, 2026 is the year it becomes an operational mandate. Health systems that spent 2025 waiting for clarity and guidance on the CMS Interoperability and Patient Access Final Rule will pivot to executing flexible compliance plans in preparation for 2027’s interoperability implementation deadline. Expect boards to green-light programs that tie compliance directly to clinical operations with workflow updates that simultaneously advance care and satisfy multiple mandates
Three execution priorities will separate leading IT teams from those who find themselves lagging. First, patient enablement investments that take interoperability beyond system connections can improve access for rural and underserved populations. This means incorporating broadband, portals, RPM, and digital literacy programs into patient access strategies. These initiatives should also help facilitate the transfer of patient healthcare data between disparate systems.
Second, those that view automation as a strategic imperative rather than a nice-to-have extra will further ease their regulatory burden. They’ll leverage solutions that remove clinicians as the ‘integration layer’ and unlock workforce, operational, and reporting efficiencies while improving throughput and documentation quality.
Third, resource-strapped rural and safety-net providers will need to lean on regional data-sharing, public-private partnerships, and vendor-enabled shared services to close skills and capacity gaps because going it alone isn’t viable.
While these all sound like to-dos that belong in the realm of IT leaders, clinical and operations leaders won’t be off the hook either. To help their organizations succeed in this new regulatory era, they must not only accept interoperability and technology changes into their day-to-day workflows but also embrace them. Investing the time to champion system builds, pilot solutions or new workflows, or support change management initiatives helps ensure compliance efforts go beyond checking boxes to meet the true intent of new regulations; more efficient, effective, and connected care.
Finally, when it comes to proving compliance, internal controls and external reporting capabilities must also shift. With states now controlling key funding spigots, health systems must bake in flexibility, ensuring data and reporting rails can map results to each state’s criteria as KPIs shift and solidify.
Joel Diamond, Chief Medical Officer at Aranscia
I’ve spent more than a decade working in interoperability, and precision medicine is now shining an unforgiving spotlight on gaps that have existed in electronic health records for years. As genomic and other ‘omic’ data becomes central to care, the limitations of today’s systems are becoming impossible to ignore, with many organizations returning to paper or PDF results of molecular testing. Without uniform standards for genomic data, I predict we will see worsening disruptions in clinical workflow and further burdens related to data governance.
Anne Donovan, Vice President and General Manager, Health Language at Wolters Kluwer Health
By January 2026, the CMS Interoperability and Prior Authorization Final Rule will fundamentally reshape how payers manage prior authorization workflows. Organizations that fail to adopt automated, interoperable solutions will face significant challenges, data fragmentation, inconsistent code sets, and an overwhelming manual burden. The winners in 2026 will be those who invest in data quality and terminology management. Leveraging FHIR-based terminology services will become essential for normalizing clinical data, maintaining accurate value sets, and ensuring consistent mapping across systems.
This foundation will enable real-time visibility into prior authorization approvals and decision-making, allowing organizations to prioritize cases requiring deeper clinical review. The impact will be transformative: thousands of hours saved in manual work, improved interoperability, and better care and coverage decisions across the healthcare system while meeting CMS requirements with confidence.
Tom Doyle, Chief Technology Officer at Medidata
In 2026, the rise of multi-agent ecosystems will mark an inflection point for AI in clinical research, moving beyond simply connecting more data to integrating more intelligent components across the ecosystem. Currently, most AI systems operate in silos, analyzing data within a single organization and missing the broader context. As these ecosystems evolve, networks of specialized agents across different healthcare systems will be able to communicate and collaborate, enabling more coordinated decision-making and driving better patient outcomes. This shift will help address challenges around privacy and data sovereignty, while fostering a more connected and trusted environment that accelerates innovation throughout the life sciences industry.
David Edwards, Chief Technology Officer at Relatient
When EHR adoption accelerated in the 1990s, technologists understood that the true value of digital systems depended on how well they could exchange and apply information. We are seeing a similar inflection point today with AI. Although 2025 marked a major leap forward for LLMs in healthcare, interoperability still lags too far behind. In 2026, digital health solutions will need to move beyond simply sending data to and from the EMR. The new phase of AI requires unpacking the EMR itself, accessing deeper layers of data, and making that information usable across systems. Achieving true interoperability is imperative.
Jeff Fallon, General Manager at eVideon, a TigerConnect company
In 2025, hospitals made strides forward by integrating smart rooms, virtual nursing platforms, and workflow applications, paving the way for innovative technology to enhance patient care. While these advancements have alleviated some non-clinical burdens, there’s an urgent need to streamline systems further and optimize communication strategies. As we continue this journey, it’s clear there is still much work to be done to fully harness the potential of these technologies and ensure seamless collaboration among care teams.
In 2026, health systems will move aggressively toward unified communication ecosystems that eliminate those gaps. The future isn’t just more digital tools; it’s interoperable ones. Platforms that keep words, alerts, and data flowing in a single orchestrated layer will finally give nurses and care teams the operational clarity they’ve been missing. Expect unified communication and workflow orchestration to become a top C-suite priority as it drives concrete, measurable ROI, like reduced time-to-task, fewer care delays, and meaningful decreases in nurse burnout.
Kevin M. Healy, Chief Executive Officer at ReferWell
Interoperability is essential in creating a more efficient, higher-quality, and patient-centered healthcare ecosystem, and yet for years, challenges like proprietary systems, lack of consistent standards, and varying resources have prevented complete and effortless data sharing across all healthcare providers and organizations. In the year ahead, the industry should expect to see fewer promises and more measurable progress on this front, with systems that once operated in silos beginning to connect and data finally flowing in ways that actually improve care and efficiency while building trust. For the first time, true collaboration will feel not just possible but inevitable.
David Lareau, CEO at Medicomp Systems
The next wave of health AI adopted in 2026 will focus less on exploration and more on collaboration. The Model Context Protocol will help large language models work in tandem with other algorithmic tools, moving us closer to true voice-driven interaction in healthcare. These interoperable frameworks will begin translating the promise of conversational AI into practical clinical value.
Suhas Ramachandra, Vice President, Product Strategy & Innovation at ZeOmega
By 2026, the payer-provider landscape will experience a sweeping transformation, giving rise to a ‘third culture’ built on transparency, shared accountability, and unified financial outcomes. Fragmented relationships will evolve into connected ecosystems where interoperability, digital intelligence, and aligned incentives redefine how care is delivered and financed. As regulatory mandates and value-based models accelerate, collaboration will move from aspiration to expectation, driving measurable impact on cost, quality, and equity. This transformation will mark a pivotal shift toward a healthcare system built on trust, integration, and sustainable value.
Farhad Modarai, Chief Clinical Officer of Population Health at Strive Health
The most meaningful progress in slowing chronic kidney disease (CKD) progression in patients with overlapping metabolic and cardiovascular disease will come from unifying nephrology, cardiology, and primary care teams around shared value-based care goals. Continuous clinical signals like remote monitoring data, lab trajectories, and real-time medication adherence will be key in powering this change. As these insights trigger more precise care management and just-in-time interventions, care will shift from reactive to predictive, transforming outcomes for patients with overlapping metabolic and cardiovascular disease.
Dr. Scott Schell, Chief Medical Officer at Cognizant
Healthcare and life sciences are converging through shared data ecosystems. The same interoperability standards that move imaging across hospital networks now allow molecular and clinical data to flow across research pipelines. Forbes noted that while startups have captured early enthusiasm, durable impact depends on how experimentation meets infrastructure. Health systems bring governance, compliance, and scale; startups bring velocity. The next leap will occur where these strengths intersect to unite data, workflow, and governance. Trusted exchange allows discoveries to inform care faster, while clinical outcomes refine research priorities in real time. Progress will come from connection, not competition. The best systems will learn together.
Sonja Tarrago, MD, FAAP, Commercial Strategy Director at DexCare
The transformation of healthcare from reactive response to anticipatory insight hinges on the connectivity of digital health tools. In 2026, the industry will make strides in building a system that automatically captures critical patient data, lab results, remote monitoring, and patient-reported metrics at the point of care. Automating this data tracking means digital health tools can unlock earlier intervention, reveal long-term patterns, and deliver actionable insights. And physicians will have more time to act on meaningful information. Physicians can identify high-risk patients earlier, prioritize their workloads, and make more precise decisions, reshaping care delivery and outcomes. These tools could shift the way providers interact with their patients from reactive problem-solving into a preventive strategy, where each decision is informed by continuous, real-time insights, and touchpoints are guided by predictive intelligence.
Thank you so much to everyone who took the time out of their day to submit a prediction to us, and thank you to all of you for taking the time to read this article! We could not do this without all of your support. What do you think will happen for Healthcare Interoperability in 2026? Let us know on social media. We’d love to hear from all of you!
Be sure to check out all of Healthcare IT Today’s Healthcare Interoperability content and our other 2026 Health IT Predictions.
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