Readers Write: 2026 Predictions: The Great Data Quality Reckoning in Healthcare IT

2026 Predictions: The Great Data Quality Reckoning in Healthcare IT
By Jodi Amendola

Jodi Amendola is executive advisor for the Supreme Group.

The healthcare IT industry has been playing the “Let’s Improve Interoperability!” game for what feels like decades.

Today, it’s CMS Aligned Networks, TEFCA, and information-blocking-rule enforcement. Yesterday, it was “Meaningful Use” and the HITECH Act. Before that, it was Regional Health Information Organizations and HL7.

While these efforts to improve interoperability have certainly been laudable, they’ve obviously been lacking, because we’re still talking about the problem. A recent report from KLAS Research on the state of EHR interoperability today offers some helpful context:

• While patient records are more available than ever, clinician satisfaction with external integration remains poor.
• Clinicians continue to grapple with issues like duplicative records, inconsistent formats, and poor data mapping, which limit the clinical value of shared data.
• Participation in data-sharing networks by EHR vendors has increased, but data usability has not.

The last point is critical, as all the hope about AI in healthcare will go unrealized without a foundation of accurate, comprehensive patient data for AI to base its decisions and recommendations on.

In the coming year, the healthcare industry will continue to grudgingly come to terms with a difficult truth: Interoperability means very little without connectivity. Issues highlighted in the KLAS report, like duplicative patient records and fragmented medical histories, undermine cost and quality improvement efforts and lead to suboptimal patient outcomes.

As a result, when it comes to communicating with the clients and prospects, health IT vendors will need to not only emphasize their role in delivering better interoperability, but also in improving the accuracy and usability of patient data.

It will also mean preparing for greater scrutiny, harder questions from media and industry analysts, and the need to demonstrate real value rather than aspirational promises.

To get ready, it’s important to ensure that PR and marketing do the following:

• Elevate proof over promises. With key influencers and decision-makers growing more skeptical about lofty promises, every claim needs to be backed with facts and statistics. Punchy copy is great, but hard data, case studies, and third-party research carry more weight.
• Highlight how data quality delivers clinical value. It’s not enough to merely talk about how your organization enhances interoperability. Instead, how does it bolster data integrity, eliminate duplicative records, improve outcomes, or build clinician trust? Offer clear, measurable examples of your technology’s clinical impact.
• Focus messaging on responsible AI enablement. Solid data is the difference between “quality in, quality out” and “garbage in, garbage out” when it comes to AI. Accordingly, health tech marketing should strive to position your organization as an industry champion of the accurate, complete, transparent data that is needed to drive responsible and reliable AI insights.

In 2026, it’s less about expanding the pipes of healthcare data, and more about increasing the quality of the information that flows through them. As expectations and scrutiny around data quality grow, organizations that ground their communications in evidence, clarity, and responsible innovation will stand out.