Healthcare has talked about “connected care” for decades, but in 2026 interoperability is no longer a vision statement, it is a prerequisite for AI, clinical trials, and competitive digital products. In the first episode of our Interoperability Masterclass series, Star Interoperability Solutions Architect and HL7 co‑chair Yanick Gaudet explains why interoperability has become so urgent and what device manufacturers, healthtech companies, and pharma need to do about it now.
He highlights three key priorities:
- Elevate interoperability to a core strategic pillar. Organizations should deliberately assess their current interoperability maturity, define a target state for the next 2–3 years, and align this with AI ambitions, regulatory requirements, and commercial objectives.
- Design products with interoperability in mind from day one. Treating connectivity as a late-stage integration task leads to brittle, “Frankenstein” architectures that are expensive to maintain and slow to evolve; instead, devices and digital products should be architected around explicit data models and integration patterns from the outset.
- Invest in data governance as seriously as technology. Yanick notes that interoperability is “80% politics and 20% technical implementation”: the real work lies in stakeholder alignment, data modeling, terminology management, and agreeing how data will be captured, codified, and consumed across systems.
FHIR vs HL7 v2
Yanick explains that HL7 v2 is the long‑standing “workhorse” standard for clinical data exchange – widely deployed and stable, but relatively loose and heavily customized from site to site. By contrast, FHIR is a modern, API‑driven standard built around well‑defined resources (like Patient or Observation) and profiles that strictly constrain how data elements such as vital signs and lab results are structured and coded. This stricter, profile‑based approach means FHIR enables more consistent, predictable data exchange with less bespoke mapping effort, making it better suited to today’s ecosystem of cloud services, mobile apps and AI‑driven analytics.
Connect with us
At Star, we help medical device manufacturers, healthtech companies, and pharma teams turn interoperability into a real competitive advantage. We design and build compliant, FHIR‑native, cloud‑enabled solutions that connect devices, data platforms, and EHRs while embedding data governance, regulatory readiness, and user‑centric experience design. If you’re ready to modernize HL7 v2 integrations, adopt FHIR, and launch AI‑ready digital health products, get in touch with us to explore how we can partner on your interoperability roadmap.
