Interoperability: Ahava’s Guide to Making Your Content Work Across Systems

Why interoperability is relevant to healthcare marketers

Your content lives in several places, from your CMS, patient portal, and mobile app to scheduling platforms and external directories.

What that means for most healthcare marketing teams:

• Copying, pasting, and reformatting information for several channels and platforms
• Keeping that information up to date in every system that falls under marketing’s jurisdiction
• Crossing your fingers that someone at your org is maintaining the content in the systems you don’t control so that patients see accurate information everywhere

Wouldn’t it be amazing if information could flow freely — and reliably — from its source to all the places it needs to go? This could save your team from all that manual work and ensure patients receive the right info at the right time.

It might sound like magic, but it’s just content interoperability. We asked Tim Voyles, partner and tech expert at our sister agency HealthStack Partners, for the insight you need to confidently start this conversation with IT. And he delivered.

What is interoperable content?

Interoperable content is information that different systems can exchange and reuse with little to no manual reformatting. Simply put, the systems can “talk” to each other.

Beyond supporting your workflow, interoperability can help your content get surfaced in AI and agentic experiences. To answer users’ questions, AI and agents often rely on various sources of information, such as brand websites, directories, and third-party sources. Interoperability makes it more likely that AI will find consistent, current information and accurately answer questions about your org.

Interoperability vs. integrations

This concept is about more than integrations. An integration is a specific connection that allows systems to exchange information for a defined purpose. For example, you can add your boarding pass to your phone because most airlines integrate with Apple Wallet.

Interoperability is the broader ability of 2 or more systems to exchange data and use what they receive with minimal human involvement. You can have several integrations and still lack interoperability if the connected systems can’t interpret and use the information.

Another important distinction

The term “interoperability” has slightly different meanings depending on the context:

• Healthcare interoperability: This typically refers to patient and clinical data moving between systems, like from a lab system to an EHR.
• Content interoperability: It’s the same general idea — the exchange of information between systems — but focused on marketing content rather than patient data.

The latter fits more in your lane as a marketer. When you talk about interoperability with technical teammates, do so within the context of content.

What does content interoperability look like in action?

Here’s an example: A health system might maintain physician information in one directory. The website, patient portal, apps, and other systems draw from that source. When the information changes (for instance, if a physician starts seeing patients at a new location), you update the central record, and the connected systems update automatically.

How it works:

1. A team member updates the physician’s location in the central system.
2. That system stores the update using the physician’s unique identifier.
3. The website, app, and other systems receive the change through an API or scheduled data feed.
4. Each platform matches the update to the correct physician using that identifier.
5. Automated checks confirm that the physician was matched correctly and that required information is present and formatted properly. If a field is missing or the update fails, an error report alerts the team.
6. Once the update passes the automated checks, the new location appears wherever the physician’s information is displayed.

What does content interoperability require?

First, information needs to be stored in a consistent, predictable way. For example, a physician’s name, specialty, location, and phone number should exist as separate pieces of information (think: distinct CMS fields) rather than as details buried within a long, narrative provider bio field.

Technical requirements

From a technical point of view, an interoperable setup generally includes:

• Consistent terminology and definitions (this is why you need a taxonomy)
• Defined fields for important information
• Unique identifiers for physicians, services, and locations
• Field mappings that tell connected systems which pieces of information correspond
• An agreed-upon source for each type of information*
• A reliable way for systems to exchange updates
• A process for correcting errors and conflicting information

*The goal isn’t to designate a single system as the central source for all of your information. It’s to identify the right source for each type of information. Your physician information might live in a provider directory, while the source of truth for educational health content could be your CMS.

Cross-functional collaboration

Content interoperability is a team effort. To work well together, your cross-functional team needs defined roles and responsibilities:

One person or department should coordinate the overall effort. That stakeholder might be a digital strategy, web governance, or digital operations leader.

Next step: Establish a cross-functional group that agrees on:

• The official source for each type of information
• Who can make changes
• Required information and approved terminology
• How updates move between systems
• How errors and conflicts are resolved

Is your digital content interoperable? How to evaluate your setup

It’s not your responsibility as a marketer to audit content interoperability. But it never hurts to bring specific observations and questions into your conversation with IT.

You can learn a lot by tracking where important information is maintained and where it appears. Some questions to get you started:

• Does physician or location information differ across systems?
• When something changes, how many systems need to be updated manually?
• Are teams maintaining separate spreadsheets with the same information?
• Do we know which system is the official source for certain types of information?
• When information is updated, how quickly do those updates reach every platform?

One helpful exercise is to map the journey of physician content from its source (potentially your provider directory) to every other place it appears. Look out for manual copy-pasting or reformatting steps, inconsistent facts, and duplicate information.

Your IT team or a tech vendor can then help confirm:

• Which connections are automated
• Which systems receive updates from the source and which are updated manually
• How often updates occur
• What happens when an update fails

Prioritize next steps by looking at the revenue

If you’re thinking, “We’ve amassed so much content over the years that I couldn’t even begin to map out all the info we have and where it needs to show up,” we have good news. You don’t have to. In fact, we wouldn’t suggest you try — at some point, you’d see diminishing returns.

It’s not realistic to inventory all of your content and figure out where it needs to land. Instead:

1. Identify journeys where revenue is lost: For example, are surgeons not receiving enough joint replacement bookings? Are PET-CT machines sitting unused too often due to no-shows?
2. Study the patient journey: Pay close attention to the communications patients receive.
3. Find opportunities to impact revenue: You might find moments where clear health information could bring in more patients requiring joint replacement surgery — or where empathetic “what to expect” content could reduce anxiety and prevent missed scans.
4. Fill the gaps: Use existing content to improve the patient experience and support business outcomes. Content interoperability helps you do this faster and with fewer resources.
5. Measure the impact: Track the data (such as bookings, fewer reschedules, or fewer calls to the call center) after a set amount of time to ensure the improvement made an impact.

Interoperability isn’t about fancy tech or building the perfect setup. It’s about recognizing your content as a business asset and maximizing it where it counts — without having to manage it all manually.

What’s next?

This article builds on the first 2 layers of -ready content:

1. Writing conversational content for humans and machines
2. Optimizing content for AI retrieval

Next up: Structure. Defined fields, labels, relationships, and consistent formats help systems understand what information means and how it connects.

Learn how to structure your content to power search, agentic experiences, and personalization.