Data interoperability: The key to unlocking visibility for better decisions

In our previous blogs, we explored findings from How Possible Happens, a global report that examined what sets highly productive healthcare organizations apart. The research identified four key pillars of success:

• Processes and systems
  
• Agility and future-readiness
• A culture of data
• Patient-centric care

We’ve unpacked the first two pillars. Now, let’s turn to the third: Creating a culture of data. A true culture of data isn’t possible without interoperability, because teams can’t make informed decisions when information lives in disconnected systems.

What highly successful healthcare organizations have in common

Leading organizations don’t just collect data—they activate it. They embrace standards across clinical and operational systems, giving teams the visibility they need to make informed decisions quickly and confidently. When data is normalized, connected, and accessible, it becomes the foundation for innovation.

The challenge? Most health systems are drowning in disconnected data. With hundreds of applications, devices, and platforms, information is abundant but fragmented. Without interoperability, insights stay locked in silos and value goes unrealized.

How Infor helps healthcare organizations build a culture of data

A culture of data emerges when information is trustworthy, connected, and continuously available for decision-making across clinical and operational teams. Interoperability isn’t just a technical capability—it’s the foundation that makes this possible. That’s why we built Infor Cloverleaf™, our clinical integration and data interoperability platform that removes data silos and enables organizations to seamlessly share information across providers, payers, medical devices, and life sciences partners.

Below are five ways organizations are using connected data to make better, faster decisions.

1. Improving supply chain visibility

Health systems often manage supplies across multiple facilities, making it difficult to track inventory or prevent stockouts. When enterprise resource planning (ERP) and electronic health record (EHR) data work together, teams gain a clearer picture of what’s needed and can plan more effectively. At the University of Maryland Medical System, this connected approach helped standardize practices across 11 hospitals while reducing strain on clinical staff.

2. Powering smarter medical devices

Medical device manufacturers increasingly rely on high quality clinical data to train artificial intelligence (AI) models and support real time decision guidance. The challenge is gathering that data securely and consistently from hundreds or thousands of sites. Infor™ Cloverleaf enables this level of data aggregation, as seen in our integration with NVIDIA Holoscan, which supports real time AI processing at the edge for richer, patient specific insights.

3. Closing care gaps

When organizations operate multiple EHRs across clinics or service lines, it’s difficult to understand where care gaps exist or how patients move through the system. Consolidating these data sources into a single view helps teams uncover trends and act more quickly. MultiCare Health System, based in Tacoma, WA, accomplished this by using Infor Cloverleaf to bring together information from systems such as Epic, eClinicalWorks, and NextGen, enabling more effective population health analysis.

4. Enabling AI with better data

Healthcare data is often complex and inconsistent, with missing elements or values stored in the wrong place, making it difficult for AI to generate reliable insights. Normalizing data as it moves across platforms creates the complete, structured foundation required for AI to deliver accurate clinical or operational recommendations. Infor Cloverleaf’s built in tools help align and standardize data from multiple sources, ensuring inputs are high quality, consistent, and ready for generative or agentic AI applications. This becomes especially important when aggregating data across systems to understand full patient journeys or track implants across care environments.

5. Streamlining prior authorization

Prior authorization remains one of healthcare’s most time consuming manual processes, largely due to varying payer requirements and the need to navigate legacy formats. Using Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources® (FHIR®) based orchestration along with mappings to HL7® and X12, Cloverleaf enables organizations to automate these steps so clinicians can determine requirements and submit requests directly within their existing workflow. This reduces delays, lowers administrative burden, and helps patients receive timely care. Because Infor Cloverleaf layers over existing infrastructures, including SMART on FHIR applications on many EHR systems, it provides modernization without requiring disruptive rip and replace projects.

When data flows freely, teams can focus on delivering exceptional care instead of managing complexity. Interoperability is the foundation, and Infor Cloverleaf gives organizations the tools to activate their data, improve operations, and prepare confidently for the future of healthcare.

Coming up next: How Infor can support healthcare organizations deliver patient centric care.