Why healthcare system integration is the unsexy problem that actually matters
Every healthcare startup talks about disruption. Better UX, AI diagnostics, patient-first design. All valid. But there's one thing that quietly kills most of them before they reach scale: their product doesn't talk to anything else.
EHRs, billing systems, lab platforms, insurance APIs - hospitals run on dozens of disconnected tools, and they've been doing it for 20+ years. A shiny new app that can't plug into that ecosystem isn't a solution. It's just more noise.
Healthcare system integration isn't glamorous. Nobody's putting it on a pitch deck hero slide. But it's the difference between a product that gets adopted and one that gets evaluated, piloted, and quietly dropped.
HL7, FHIR, DICOM - these aren't buzzwords, they're the actual infrastructure layer healthcare runs on. If you're building in this space and you don't have a clear interoperability story, you're building on sand.
The good news? It's a solvable problem, and it doesn't have to eat your entire dev budget. It just requires working with people who've done it before.
If you're a healthcare startup figuring out how to build a product that actually fits into existing clinical infrastructure, this is worth reading.
