The Erosion of Healthcare Trust is a Data Infrastructure Problem
How data silos make the industry and the people it serves sicker.
Written by Geeta Nayyar | 5 min • March 31, 2025
Which topics do you want to hear about?
*Required
You are subscribed to The Array!
We'll send you the latest news.
Let me ask you a question: Do you trust your doctor?
What if we expand the question and I ask if you trust the healthcare system. What would you say?
Your answer to the first question is probably “yes.” According to healthcare policy group KFF, 93 percent of Americans trust their doctor to make good health recommendations. But your answer to the second is likely more tentative. Only 36 percent of people trust healthcare as a whole, according to Gallup polls.
Therein lies one of the biggest problems facing healthcare today: People trust their physicians, but not the system their physicians represent. And what little trust they have in the system is falling.
When healthcare leaders and policy experts talk about this growing distrust, they rarely mention data infrastructure. But it’s an integral part of the problem. It’s also a solution.
I’ve seen firsthand how data defines patient experiences. As a rheumatologist, my patients were usually referred to me by their primary doctor. Here’s how that process typically unfolded:
I’d ask my patient why they were seeing a rheumatologist. They’d say it was because of something their primary doctor saw in their lab work.
“Great. What did they see?” I’d ask.
Silence. Followed by blank stares.
The patient would ask me to look at my computer, and I’d explain that my computer was different from their primary doctor’s. Because healthcare’s data infrastructure is deeply siloed, there’s no universal record that follows patients from one healthcare interaction to the next. My patients may have had dozens of appointments with other providers, but insights from those interactions remained locked away. When patients showed up in my office, I often couldn’t access any of their data.
We’d end up having to repeat lab work, which not only cost money, but time — two critical resources for someone who’s sick. Other data infrastructure challenges — lagging interoperability, inefficient triage and referral processes, inadequate integrations with electronic medical records and more — meant it could take six months for patients to get an appointment with me in the first place, and then another three or four months to see me again after we got their lab results.
Upgrading Data Centers?
Considering a data center upgrade? Learn 10 key questions to ask to ensure flexibility, scale, and efficiency.
In that time, depending on their condition, they might have irrevocably lost joint mobility, or far worse. All because there weren’t systems in place to easily share data among medical offices.
This is just one small example of how poor data management and infrastructure negatively affects healthcare and public perception. You don’t need to look far for others.
The February 2024 UnitedHealth Group/Change Healthcare ransomware attack, for example, exposed the vulnerabilities in centralized healthcare data systems. When hackers breached the network, they compromised the personal health information of an estimated 100 million people. This massive affront to patient privacy eroded trust — and it caused widespread disruptions to essential healthcare services, including revenue cycles.
"Bad data quality costs healthcare organizations an average of $12.9 million annually. "
Poor data infrastructure not only welcomes cyber threats, it also undermines data quality. Bad data quality costs healthcare organizations an average of $12.9 million annually, increasing administrative costs and friction among payers, providers and the people they serve.
So much poor infrastructure leads to what we recognize as the modern patient experience, which is anything but modern. Long wait times, rushed appointments, paper forms to be filled out again and again, surprise bills. It’s no wonder patients are losing faith.
Here’s the good news. Advancements in healthcare data infrastructure technology make it possible to improve experiences for both patients and physicians. New tools can help us restore people’s trust in healthcare and stop the cycle of misinformation.
And while sweeping reform would help, we don’t need it to get started. We have the resources right now.
Here are three places to start:
1. Patients: Take control
I’m still surprised by the number of people who come in for an appointment and don’t know how to access their basic medical data, like their most recent blood pressure reading or allergies. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not their fault.
I save all of my medical records (as well as my family’s), and I take them with me when I have an appointment. I recommend the same practice to my patients.
But this is a workaround, a way to claw back some control in a disjointed system where, thanks to outdated data infrastructure, patients often feel confused and disenfranchised. By taking this step, patients can avoid unnecessary appointments and repeat lab work. Everything moves more efficiently, for the patient as well as the enterprise.
And in a system where 25 percent of spend is wasted, every efficiency is worth investigation.
2. Healthcare organizations: Make it easy
Medical offices and hospitals aren’t set up to simplify patient access to data. Every organization has its own standard for sharing medical records with patients — via portal, print-out, email or on a disk they can only open when they’re back in the same medical office (anyone who’s had an X-ray is familiar with that particular frustration).
Patient data belongs to the patient. And when enterprises act like it, they increase transparency in a way that sets up the people they serve, and the enterprise’s bottom line, for success.
When I buy something at a retailer, I go through a checkout process. I know what I’m getting and how much it costs, I agree to pay and I get a receipt. I know what to expect. And if I have an issue with my purchase, I know who to call.
Healthcare leaders could learn from that model. They must do whatever’s in their power to simplify access to medical records. And, in a retail-like checkout process, to make sure each patient has their records, can open and understand them and can find them on demand.
It’s a simple change that could save everyone money and time.
3. Everyone: Lean into AI
Recent advancements in AI can do so much of this heavy lifting for us. Healthcare organizations are using AI to create instant summaries of objective data, including lab results, X-rays, even clinician notes. Rather than having to sift through years’ worth of data, providers and payers can quickly summarize and analyze the information they need.
Not only does this save time during office appointments, it could be incredibly useful when sharing data among medical facilities and insurers. Right now, data typically follows the patient too late, if at all. If someone is admitted to the ER, they probably don’t have their records, and there’s no fast way for a medical team to request them.
But with AI, along with the appropriate safeguards and patient permission, we could share data in real time. In the case of elective procedures, we could send critical data in advance with fewer hiccups.
That’s the kind of change that could save lives.
We’re still waiting to see whether AI will improve health literacy or drive yet another wedge between patients and the healthcare system. Right now, it appears to be a neck-and-neck race. Still, patients are using the tool to fill gaps in care — to comprehend and fight rejected insurance claims, make sense of complicated healthcare jargon, create personalized questions for their doctors and even shop around for the plans and providers that suit them best.
Better data infrastructure won’t solve all of healthcare’s problems. But it can help to make information available when and where it’s needed, so patients get the care and experiences they deserve.
That’s how we rebuild trust. It begins with our data infrastructure. And it begins with us.
Geeta Nayyar
Contributor
Geeta Nayyar, MD, MBA, is a rheumatologist, chief medical officer, and national best-selling author of the book Dead Wrong: Diagnosing and Treating Healthcare’s Misinformation Illness.
The Array is a thought leadership publication curated by Hitachi Vantara, dedicated to exploring the intersection of data, technology, innovation, and leadership. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed on this website are solely those of the individual authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Hitachi Vantara or its affiliates.
