Connecting the care journey: 10 actions for healthcare leaders

Healthcare has no shortage of digital solutions. The challenge is making them work together to improve care.

Healthcare organizations are investing in electronic health records, patient portals, cloud platforms, virtual care, artificial intelligence (AI) and data-driven services. Yet digital capabilities are often advancing faster than connected patient journeys.

Patients may still repeat their medical history, navigate different systems or encounter providers working from different versions of the same information. Healthcare professionals face the other side of this fragmentation, spending valuable time searching for information, duplicating documentation and moving between systems.

The next phase of digital health should focus less on adding another platform and more on connecting care around the patient journey. Here are 10 actions healthcare leaders can start taking today.

1. Capture information once and make it reusable

Healthcare still relies heavily on documents, PDFs and duplicated data entry. Organizations should move toward structured, machine-readable and reusable health information, supported by clear rules for data ownership, provenance, quality, versioning and access.

In Europe, the European Health Data Space adds urgency, with structured cross-border exchange of priority health information becoming a requirement from 2029 onward.

CGI helps clients put this principle into practice. We have transformed extensive patient records into structured, pseudonymized timelines covering medication and social-service activities, making information easier to retrieve and reuse while reducing duplicate documentation.

2. Integrate around the patient journey

Start by mapping the end-to-end care journey. Where is information entered more than once? Where do patients repeat their history? Where do clinicians wait for information?

Appointment booking, referrals, medical history, admission, treatment, discharge and follow-up should form one information chain. The goal is to reduce unnecessary steps while making relevant information available when and where it is needed.

3. Make interoperability a procurement requirement

Healthcare does not lack standards. The challenge is implementing them consistently.

FHIR interfaces, structured export, portability and documented application programming interfaces (APIs) should be standard procurement requirements alongside functionality, cost, usability and security.

This can give healthcare organizations greater control over information flows, reduce vendor lock-in and make it easier to introduce new services, AI or analytics. Interoperability should be treated as a long-term organizational capability, not an individual project requirement.

4. Integrate digital services into clinical workflows

A digital check-in creates little value if professionals must enter the same information into another system. The same principle applies to patient portals, virtual care and AI.

Digital services should integrate into clinical and administrative workflows with minimal manual intervention. Ask whether they eliminate manual steps, make information easier to find and reduce documentation or administrative work.

Measure success by improvements for patients and healthcare professionals, not simply by the number of digital services deployed.

5. Design cybersecurity into connected care

As care becomes more connected, electronic health records, medical devices, patient applications, cloud services, APIs, AI systems and external partners all require appropriate protection.

Organizations need controls reflecting the sensitivity of information and each system's role in care delivery, including access controls, segmentation, threat monitoring, resilient backup and recovery, auditable data access and incident-response procedures.

Security and interoperability need to be designed together so the right people can access the right information for the right purpose.

6. Match workloads to the right infrastructure

The choice is not simply cloud versus on-premises infrastructure. Different workloads and regulations have different requirements for availability, latency, data sensitivity and sovereignty, scalability and regulation.

A hybrid architecture can keep clinically critical workloads close to care delivery while using governed cloud capabilities for analytics, AI development, research and collaboration.

The better question is: Which data and workloads can be processed where, for which purpose and under which safeguards?

7. Start AI with measurable problems

Instead of asking where to deploy AI, ask which problem needs solving.

Clinical documentation, information retrieval, discharge summaries, coding support, prioritization and operational planning are areas where AI may reduce administrative burden or improve decision-making.

For example, CGI supported the Wellbeing Services County of North Ostroboth (Pohde) in integrating AI-powered speech recognition into clinical documentation. Doctors can dictate directly into the text field and immediately review and correct the result, reducing transcription queues and back-and-forth communication while freeing more time for patient care.

Effectively scaling AI depends on defining the desired outcomes before deployment and measuring whether professionals are spending less time documenting, retrieving information faster or improving process quality.

8. Create safe environments for innovation

Not every new technology should connect to production clinical systems immediately.

Healthcare organizations need governed environments where AI, analytics and digital services can be developed, tested and validated safely before moving into production.

Governance should define how innovations are evaluated for data quality, security, clinical relevance, performance, human oversight and accountability. This gives teams room to experiment while maintaining the safeguards healthcare requires.

9. Build today's foundation for more preventive and personalized care

Interoperable data, secure infrastructure and scalable computing can help healthcare organizations move beyond digitizing existing processes toward more preventive and personalized care.

One emerging example is the digital triplet, which connects complementary dimensions of an individual, such as clinical and phenotypic information, biological or genetic information, and physiological or sensor-derived data.

In cardiovascular disease, for example, combining clinical history and phenotype with genetic risk and longitudinal ECG or wearable data could help identify increased risk earlier and support more individualized monitoring, prevention and treatment.

Leaders today must build the interoperable data, governance, and secure infrastructure these emerging models will require.

10. Measure outcomes, not technology deployments

The number of applications, interfaces, cloud workloads or AI pilots says relatively little about transformation success.

Instead, measure what changes for patients, healthcare professionals and the organization. Are duplicate entries decreasing? Are professionals spending less time on documentation? Is relevant information available during transitions of care? Can patients navigate the system more easily?

These measures connect technology investment directly to the experience of delivering and receiving care.

The next step is organizational, not technological

Many of the technologies needed to connect care already exist. The harder challenge is creating the architecture, governance, security and accountability that allows them to work together around patients and healthcare professionals.

For healthcare leaders, this changes the question behind technology investment. Rather than asking what another digital solution can do, ask how the investment will improve continuity across the patient journey.

Will healthcare professionals have better access to the information they need? Will patients repeat fewer steps? Will teams spend less time on administration and more time delivering care?

Connected care ultimately depends on technology, data and people working together to improve care.

I welcome conversations with healthcare leaders about the practical steps their organizations are taking to move from disconnected digital services toward connected care.

This article draws on the July 2026 Interop Council paper “Patientenportale im Zusammenspiel mit Primärsystemen und ePA.”