3 Data Pitfalls and How Providers Are Addressing Them: Takeaways from HIMSS and ViVE 2026

At this year’s HIMSS and ViVE conferences, one theme came through consistently: healthcare’s digital transformation is accelerating, but the underlying data infrastructure isn’t always keeping pace.

Through my conversations, I found that many organizations are facing the same core challenges as they expand their AI, interoperability, and cloud initiatives. Here are three of the most pressing pitfalls the industry is seeing in data management and how leading organizations are beginning to address them.

1. AI ambitions are outpacing data readiness.

As hospitals and physician practices begin integrating AI into clinical and financial workflows, many are hitting a fundamental barrier: unstructured data.

AI models generally depend on structured, standardized inputs. Yet the majority of healthcare data still lives in unstructured formats, such as clinical notes, imaging reports, scanned documents, and TIFF files. When that data can’t be easily accessed or interpreted, the result is incomplete patient records, limited interoperability, and automated workflows that stall before they can deliver value.

This is where many organizations misstep. The problem is often not data capture but data extraction. Traditional OCR tools can digitize text, but they often fall short in converting it into usable, discrete data elements that have intelligent context trained with an understanding of common healthcare forms

To close this gap, providers are increasingly focusing on solutions that can interpret healthcare-specific language and convert unstructured inputs into structured outputs aligned with standards such as HL7, FHIR and X12. Technologies like AI-powered document processing are becoming more common to transform previously inaccessible data into actionable information within workflows to find real ROI from AI solutions. 

2. Interoperability progress is real but uneven.

Even as adoption of FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) accelerates, progress remains inconsistent across the healthcare ecosystem. Struggles to meet these standards remain common among small or rural hospitals, long-term care facilities, and specialized providers, such as those in behavioral health. The result is a fragmented landscape where seamless data exchange is still difficult to achieve.

In response, organizations are turning to practical bridging strategies. Many organizations are looking to solutions that can extract data from both structured and unstructured sources, convert it into FHIR-compatible formats, and securely transmit it between disparate systems. Using digital fax as a “translator,” an academic medical center operating on modern FHIR standards can exchange information with a rural provider using a legacy or homegrown EHR without requiring either organization to overhaul its existing systems and workflows.

3. A new regulatory push means gaps in cloud strategies can no longer be ignored.

Despite years of investment in cloud infrastructure, paper-based workflows, especially fax, remain deeply embedded in healthcare operations. Data that exists outside the EHR in this way causes inefficiencies, delays, manual data entry, and increases the risk of inaccurate or missing data. Consequently, regulatory pressure is growing. CMS’s recent announcement for claims attachments is aimed at reducing administrative burdens by pushing organizations to move toward electronic transactions. This new rule creates a further divide, as many rural and post-acute facilities have not reached the digital maturity needed to support the required X12 or HL7 transmission for attachments requested in the claims process. A solution like eFax® Clarity integrated with a translation engine can allow providers to send a digital cloud fax that is intercepted and transmitted to CMS as X12 or HL7.

Modernizing fax processes is becoming an essential part of broader digital transformation efforts. Enterprise cloud fax solutions like eFax Corporate® allow healthcare organizations to send and receive faxes digitally, integrate with EHR systems via API, and support secure, compliant document exchange. When combined with intelligent processing through eFax® Clarity, and data transformation capabilities with eFax® Conductor, these solutions help eliminate document bottlenecks, reduce errors, and simplify workflows from intake to care delivery.

A More Connected, Data-Ready Future

Across all three trends, a common thread emerges: Success in healthcare transformation increasingly depends on the ability to access, structure, and exchange data seamlessly.

Advances in the industry, such as agentic AI and FHIR interoperability, hold great promise for improving the efficiency and effectiveness of clinical and financial processes in healthcare. But without the right data foundation, their impact will remain limited. By addressing gaps in data extraction, bridging interoperability divides, and modernizing legacy workflows such as paper-based fax, providers can turn persistent challenges into meaningful progress.

Bevey Miner

Healthcare Strategist