When Tech Giants Merge Without Interoperability: Risks of Healthcare IT M&As
In the healthcare industry, mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are often positioned as strategic masterstrokes. This is especially true for IT and IS leaders at health systems. M&As promise specialization, expanded offerings, and accelerated innovation.
The reality can be less glamorous.
Often, tech giants buy companies with niche products, rebrand them under a unified portfolio, and market them as “integrated.” Yet, under the surface, these solutions remain disparate systems, stitched together through branding rather than true interoperability.
For health systems, mergers and acquisitions can mean complexity, inefficiency, and unmet expectations when intentional interoperability isn’t baked into the process from the beginning.
Moreover, prioritizing interoperability has never been more important for health systems in 2025, as healthcare technology continues to rapidly advance across organizations and more and more leaders become aware of the need for seamless exchanging of information.
Ensuring your health system is well positioned for a merger or acquisition only accentuates this need.
When Acquisitions Create More Silos, Not Fewer
M&As create often unforeseen layers of complexity for ITS teams that, if not handled properly, can lead to negative downstream effects to the everyday operations of health systems.
A recent example in the healthcare IT space illustrates the challenge.
A global vendor acquired a leading device connectivity and data integration firm, touting the deal as a way to deliver seamless clinical interoperability.
In practice, the picture looked different.
The acquired platform and the parent company’s existing systems were not architected for unification. This meant that customers were left managing parallel infrastructures, each with its own workflows and data models.
Even more, marketing materials positioned these systems as equivalent to truly interoperable platforms. But in deployment, hospitals encountered redundancy, inefficiency, and hidden costs, highlighting the importance of deeply understanding the technology and any necessary fine print and disclosures.
In this case — and in many others — the promise of synergy gave way to a reality of layered complexity and vendor lock-in.
The Hidden Costs of Disparate M&A Portfolios
The purpose of a merger or acquisition is often to integrate a new innovative technology that the acquiring company sees as necessary to its growth.
However, disparate company technology portfolios can cause a host of issues and hidden costs for both the acquiring company, and the company being acquired. Some of these issues and hidden costs include:
● Customer Confusion: Hospitals expect a unified solution but receive multiple disconnected systems with overlapping claims.
● Clinical Risk: Interoperability failures in healthcare aren’t just IT problems — they can delay care, obscure vital information, and contribute to adverse events.
● False Equivalence in the Market: By marketing disparate systems as “comparable” to unified platforms, large vendors obscure critical differences, leaving health systems to discover those gaps after purchase and deployment.
● Value Erosion: The acquisition premium benefits shareholders, not customers, if interoperability never materializes. Over time, this weakens trust and creates space for disruptors.
● IT Burden: This is multiplied by the history of technology companies that have made promises that never came to fruition, leading to IT teams being overly burdened with having to implement new pilots and validation tests to simply prove technology platforms are real and effective.
In the end, it’s often the patients who can be left worse off than if the two companies had remained separate.
Why Transparency Matters
The real issue isn’t the act of acquiring companies. It’s the lack of transparency about interoperability strategy.
Health systems deserve clear answers to critical questions, such as:
● Are these products truly integrated, or simply co-marketed under one brand?
● What is the roadmap to unification, and who bears the cost?
● How much effort will fall on the hospital systems to bridge the gaps between systems?
Without honest answers, M&A portfolios risk becoming expensive patchworks, leaving hospital systems to pay the price.
The Alternative: Platforms Built for Interoperability
Not all platforms fall into this trap, however. Some, including Sickbay, were engineered from inception to enable vendor-neutral interoperability.
How is that done?
First, unified architecture aggregates patient data across devices, vendors, and locations. When new platforms from new vendors are integrated, their data is automatically shared between other vendors’ platforms.
Instead of hiding its interoperability, platforms like Sickbay incorporate interoperability as a core part of their design. This avoids clunky post-acquisition retrofit projects when interoperability is an up-front consideration.
Additionally, platforms built for interoperability are built with enterprise scalability in mind. Enterprise scalability enables system-wide monitoring without duplicating infrastructures. This is essential for interoperability, especially for larger mergers and acquisitions where scale is critical.
Finally, interoperability-enabled platforms come with trust. With these optimized platforms, health systems get what they were promised — simplicity, visibility, and flexibility — instead of hidden costs and last-minute retrofits.
Data platforms that prioritize interoperability like Sickbay eliminate silos typical of bolt-on mergers and acquisitions.
Final Thought: Don’t Buy the Patchwork
It’s inevitable: Mergers and acquisitions among healthcare IT and IS departments will continue at a rapid pace.
This means the real question for health systems isn’t, “How many products does this vendor own?” Rather, the core question is, “Do these products actually work together today?”
Without transparency, health systems risk buying into disparate portfolios marketed as integrated platforms, only to face years of costly integration projects.
True interoperability isn’t achieved through acquisition. It’s built into the DNA of data platforms.
Sickbay, the only FDA-cleared, vendor-neutral platform that enables access to disparate patient data from numerous bedside devices in near-real time, can ensure your health system is ready for any tech-driven M&A deal, no matter the complexity or scale.
Contact our team today to see how Sickbay can position your health system for an ever-evolving healthcare IT M&A landscape.
