Kevin O'hara on interoperability
From How Interoperability Supports Healthcare Operations and Learning | A Conversation with Kevin O'Hara · · HealthStream
“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.”
On , Kevin O'hara, Executive Vice President of Workforce Platform and Applications at HEALTHSTREAM INC, spoke about interoperability during How Interoperability Supports Healthcare Operations and Learning | A Conversation with Kevin O'Hara on HealthStream.
About Kevin O'hara
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 applications—covering learning, credentialing, and scheduling—to 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.