The Beat

Healthcare Interoperability Is the Foundation for AI

Episode Summary

In this episode of Interop Now, host Sandy Vance chats with Dima Goncharov, co-founder & CEO of Metriport, about the evolving healthcare interoperability landscape, health information exchanges, FHIR, QHINs, and the challenge of bringing fragmented clinical data together. They discuss why interoperability is becoming table stakes in modern healthcare, the limits of building connections in-house, and how a stronger data foundation can help providers move from simply exchanging information to using it to improve care. They also explore how AI and large language models answer complex patient questions in real time when the underlying data is trustworthy, accessible, and properly organized.

Episode Notes

Healthcare organizations are under increasing pressure to make better use of data, AI, and automation but none of those technologies can reach their full potential without reliable access to the right patient information. 

In this episode of Interop Now, host Sandy Vance chats with Dima Goncharov, co-founder & CEO of Metriport, about the evolving healthcare interoperability landscape, health information exchanges, FHIR, QHINs, and the challenge of bringing fragmented clinical data together. They discuss why interoperability is becoming table stakes in modern healthcare, the limits of building connections in-house, and how a stronger data foundation can help providers move from simply exchanging information to using it to improve care. They also explore how AI and large language models answer complex patient questions in real time when the underlying data is trustworthy, accessible, and properly organized.

In this episode, they talk about:

• Why healthcare interoperability continues to evolve and why connecting to a single network still isn't enough to create a complete patient picture.
• How health information exchanges, national networks, and emerging frameworks such as TEFCA fit into today's interoperability landscape.
• Why healthcare data transformation, patient matching, record location, and deduplication remain major challenges even after connectivity is established.
• Why Metriport believes interoperability should be treated as table-stakes infrastructure, rather than a project healthcare organizations have to continually build and maintain themselves.
• How clean, accessible longitudinal patient data creates the foundation for AI, automation, and modern care models.
• Why AI and LLMs could help providers synthesize complicated healthcare data and answer patient-specific questions in real time.
• Real-world examples of interoperability helping providers surface previously unavailable information, avoid unnecessary testing, and make faster treatment decisions.

A Little About Dima:

Dima Goncharov is the Co-Founder and CEO of Metriport, an open-source platform transforming healthcare data exchange. With a background as a software engineer, Dima has built everything from aerospace and defense mission systems to highly available cloud database services at Amazon Web Services (AWS). Dima’s passion for transparent, secure, and accessible health data solutions is evident in Metriport’s mission and the APIs they’ve developed for seamless medical record retrieval. Dima is an alumnus of both British Columbia Institute of Technology and of Y Combinator’s S22 cohort. Now based in San Francisco, he leads Metriport’s efforts to modernize and open up healthcare interoperability for providers everywhere.