How Interoperability Supports Healthcare Operations and Learning | A Conversation with Kevin O'Hara
Poor interoperability and platform integration are becoming increasing liabilities as healthcare technology experts estimate theseΒ ...
Executive Vice President of Workforce Platform and Applications, Healthstream
Search every verified Kevin O'hara interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote β each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Kevin O'Hara, Executive Vice President of Workforce Platform and Applications at HealthStream, discussed the company's approach to interoperability in a February 2025 webinar. He described HealthStream's goal of becoming "healthcare's people platform," aiming to centralize information about healthcare workers, including credentials, licenses, and competencies. O'Hara stated that the company is building a technology platform that allows its own applicationsβcovering learning, credentialing, and schedulingβto communicate with each other, and also enables third-party partners to integrate their data. He noted that a key challenge is "data matching and identity resolution," and that the company is working to assign a single HealthStream ID to each healthcare worker that follows them across their career. O'Hara highlighted several practical applications of this interoperability, such as automatically creating a new hire in the system from HR data, assigning required courses, and restricting access until training is complete. He also mentioned that the platform provides automatic primary source verification of professional licenses, reducing manual work for hospital staff. O'Hara, who previously spent nine years running a surgical analytics company before returning to HealthStream, said the company's presence in 70% of U.S. hospitals creates an opportunity for other businesses to build products on top of its platform.
“We're in 70% of hospitals around the country and so that opportunity to help other companies build their products, build their businesses on top of that presence was always very compelling for the company.”
“Interoperability is systems talking to each other and then it's what they're talking about. One of the things we're really focused on is talking about the same person no matter what system they're in.”
“We want every individual human who works in healthcare to have one and only one HealthStream ID that follows them across their entire career and across all of these applications.”
“Recruiting and retaining your top talent is incredibly important, very hard today, and understanding someone's experience, competency, training, and credentials is necessary to both identify and retain your top talent.”
“Anything you can do to make someone's day-to-day easier is important. If you provide this information to the end users automatically, you also have an opportunity to congratulate them and give them kudos for the work they're doing.”
“Our goal is to be healthcare's people platform so anything you need to know about someone who works in healthcare you should be able to find out from our platform, which takes a lot of the friction out of hiring, retention, and promotion processes.”
“The top challenge is just very basic challenges like data matching and identity resolution. We have tens of millions of records and have been at this for nearly 30 years, so just basic blocking and tackling is a big part of what we do.”
“The HealthStream ID is essentially your passport; it ties you together across systems and follows you across your entire career in healthcare.”
“One example of interoperability in action is that a new hire can be automatically created in our system by the HR system, assigned required courses, and only allowed to badge in or work a shift once training is complete, all without manual intervention.”
“We offer primary source verification data about professional licenses automatically, which frees up hospital staff from manual verification work to focus on higher-level organizational and talent development tasks.”
Poor interoperability and platform integration are becoming increasing liabilities as healthcare technology experts estimate theseΒ ...
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