As healthcare organizations continue to evaluate and advance their technology, true interoperability remains a persistent challenge. Health systems are increasingly looking for opportunities to create a seamless data exchange across their enterprises to improve patient care without adding complexity.
Becker’s Healthcare recently spoke with Jesse Cugliotta, global head of healthcare and life sciences at Snowflake, to learn more about the current state of interoperability and how modern health systems are enabling seamless data sharing through a modern data foundation.
Editor’s note: Responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Question: Healthcare has long grappled with complex interoperability standards and initiatives. How would you characterize the current landscape, and what barriers are preventing health systems from achieving true data interoperability?
Jesse Cugliotta: Forcing organizations to adopt standards doesn’t work. Organizations have purchased best-in-class solutions to solve specific problems, which has created fragmentation, compounded by merger and acquisition activity. The result is organizations with multiple EMRs, and it’s clearly linked to attempts at standardization by vendors and regulatory initiatives.
What we see from innovative customers is an open approach. They want to be able to work with all standards and leverage the latest technology while seamlessly sharing data in real time between all stakeholders across any cloud.
That’s what Snowflake does. We have a saying about Snowflake: “It just works.” That’s our vision and how we think about interoperability; it shouldn’t require a two-year initiative with a systems integrator. It should just work.
Q: A common assumption is that interoperability requires complicated integrations. Have you seen hospitals or health systems address data-sharing challenges with a simpler approach? What did this look like?
JC: Complicated integrations aren’t required. Corewell Health in Michigan is an example of a payer-provider with 14 hospitals and over 100 ambulatory sites that had multiple data silos.
Corewell is leveraging Snowflake to share data across all of its internal silos to support consumer experience initiatives and provide a comprehensive, 360-degree view of the individual, from a member perspective or from the patient side.
Another example is Florida Cancer Specialists. With nearly 100 clinics serving 2.9 million patients annually, their legacy processes made managing and sharing unstructured data cumbersome and time-intensive.
They simplified their approach to interoperability and created a single, trusted data source across their entire network which enables real-time data sharing, data democratization, and supports value-based oncology care.
Q: You’ve worked with organizations that combine analytical data with real-time interface data (FHIR/HL7/EDI). Why is bridging these traditionally separate worlds so powerful, and what operational use cases does it enable?
JC: Healthcare organizations have historically had analytics teams and interface teams, which are the plumbers in health systems. However, these teams often haven’t spoken with each other. Snowflake has partnered with companies like Redox to capture the output of the interface teams and make this data available for Snowflake in real time.
This enables use cases that bring together historical and real-time data that is relevant to a decision a clinician needs to make right now. Many critical AI use cases will be enabled by bringing this data together.
Q: How are simplified data-sharing approaches enabling AI innovation, and what new possibilities do you see emerging when organizations can effectively combine historical and real-time data?
JC: I think about the supply chain. Usually when people talk about supply chains, they think about helping manufacturers save money by operating more efficiently.
But healthcare providers are at the end of the supply chain, where things get used and consumed. When stockouts happen, clinicians are faced with tough decisions, such as, do I use an alternative product that is not ideal but will still work?
AI enables health systems to make better supply chain decisions. For example, if health systems could simultaneously access the consumption history of various products and in real time see inventory levels at their facility, as well as forward-looking signals like severe weather events that might affect product availability, this information would lead to better decisions that help prevent shortages before they happen.
Q: For healthcare leaders feeling overwhelmed by interoperability challenges, what key mindset shifts or strategies can help them move forward with confidence?
JC: Wouldn’t it be great if we could think from an outcomes-first perspective, rather than a procedure or policy-first perspective? For example, let’s say I’m trying to triage a patient who’s presenting with surgical complications as fast as possible. I’m trying to get to an outcome. It’s important to consider—if I didn’t have a standard procedure in place, how would I approach that problem?
This isn’t about technology, though technology is enabling the fastest way to get there.
There’s recent precedent for this. During COVID, there was no time to do things the old way. People acted with urgency, without constraints, because they had to move quickly, with a focus on patient outcomes. It opened up a lot of possibilities around how we can do things differently.
When I think about mindset shifts or strategies, I think we need to continue to embrace that mindset of urgency we saw during COVID and use this to drive more positive outcomes.
Q: What makes Snowflake different, and why should healthcare organizations consider Snowflake compared to other platforms?
JC: One is we run on any of the major clouds. This is important because healthcare organizations have different cloud strategies and they need to be able to talk to each other across boundaries. That’s something we’ve always been able to do, which is a key differentiator.
When we think about interoperability, we’re trying to figure out how we can gain access to additional data that we don’t have. At Snowflake, we are well positioned to help with that. We provide a secure, compliant, and flexible data foundation that supports value-based care initiatives and modernized operations. Getting to that foundation requires data from outside of your organization; there’s no easier way to do that than to simply share it using cloud technology like Snowflake.
One thing everyone is trying to do right now is build and deploy an AI strategy, and we’re agnostic with regard to AI models. Our philosophy is that rather than try and compete on the model itself, we let you leverage them natively inside of our platform.
Q: Looking ahead, how do you see the role of interoperability evolving? What impact could enhanced data sharing have on efficiency, cost savings and future healthcare delivery?
JC: Describing the impact of interoperability can be illustrated through an experience my wife shared with me recently. She works in the emergency department at a large health system. A patient came in with complications after a recent surgery at the city’s other large health system. Sometimes it’s simpler to just do a new workup than to request records from the other health system. That’s because the process is to sign a consent form that is faxed to the other facility; that facility then prints out the records and faxes them back, costing critical time when a patient is awaiting care.
It would be much easier if, after consent was provided, the data was shared electronically. Consent could trigger a data access policy enabling providers to have immediate access to the records.
That example exemplifies the opportunity for collaboration and data sharing in healthcare, which doesn’t exist today. If data could be easily and instantaneously shared, it would improve patient care, improve efficiency and save costs.
