Interoperability and connectors: making your data flow

About this guide

Your processes run through tools that don’t talk to each other: messaging, spreadsheets, CRM, ERP, LIMS, cloud storage, industry software. This guide explains how to connect them, which standards to use in healthcare and life sciences, and how to choose or build the right connector.

It is for leaders, IT managers and business teams who want to eliminate re-keying and make their data usable, including by AI.

Contents

1. 1 · Making data flow
2. 2 · Standards and regulatory frameworks
3. 3 · Three families of connectors
4. 4 · Healthcare standards
5. 5 · Choosing and building a connector
6. 6 · Where to start

Chapter 1

Making data flow

Your tools make each person more efficient. Your losses happen between them: an order received by e-mail and re-keyed into a spreadsheet, a test result copied into a report, a patient record rebuilt from three systems. Each break costs time and produces incomplete or inconsistent data.

A connector links two systems so information flows without re-keying: it is entered once, at the source, then passed on to where it is needed. Connecting your teams’ tools rather than replacing them is often the fastest way to digitize a process.

Interoperability is also the condition for AI: without accessible, structured and comparable data, every model stays locked in a silo.

Chapter 2

Standards and regulatory frameworks

Two notions complement each other without overlapping:

• Interoperability standards define the how: the format, syntax and meaning of the data exchanged.
• Regulatory frameworks define the what and the why: legal obligations, governance, audit.

The same project can therefore fall under the GDPR, a framework, while using FHIR R4, a standard, to exchange patient data. Regulatory frameworks often reference or require standards. The "Regulatory compliance" guide details the frameworks; this one focuses on how data flows.

Chapter 3

Three families of connectors

Business activities: agnostic connectors

Everyday tools, whatever the industry. They carry the routine exchanges of processes: notifying a team, filing a document, updating a tracking sheet, finding a customer, placing an order, archiving files or querying a database.

Healthcare and life sciences: standards

In healthcare, exchanges rely on shared formats and terminologies, often required by partners or authorities: patient records, imaging, clinical trials, lab results. Chapter 4 presents them one by one.

Other industries: custom connectors

Manufacturing, finance, services: every industry has its own software, files and instruments. When no standard connector exists, our team builds it, from the software’s API, its exports or its files.

Chapter 4

Healthcare standards

Nine standards shape data exchange in healthcare and life sciences: formats and APIs, messaging, data models, terminologies and clinical data.

Chapter 5

Choosing and building a connector

A good connector is decided from the process, not from the tool. A few questions are enough to frame it:

• Direction and frequency: does data flow one way or both, in real time or in batches?
• Source of truth: which system prevails when two values differ?
• Identifiers and terminologies: how do you recognize the same customer, patient or sample from one system to another?
• Security and access: who may read and write, with which secrets and permissions?
• Traceability: is every exchange logged, for audits and to understand an error?
• Regulated context: is the connector part of a computerized system that must be validated (GAMP 5, Annex 11)?

Our approach: map data flows during the diagnostic, connect existing tools rather than adding more, and build the connector that is missing. Connectors fit into the digitized processes: they inherit their audit trail and access management.

Chapter 6

Where to start

Start with the process that costs the most in re-keying. List the tools it runs through, the information passed from one to the next and the people who copy it: you have the list of your first connectors.

The Express Process Diagnostic maps your processes and data flows in ten days and hands you a costed action plan, prioritized by gain.

Standard versions are indicative and change over time: check the version required by your partners and authorities. Healthcare standards catalogue after a synthesis published by Gencovery in 2025, reviewed and extended by Terminus 2π.