If you’ve sold into U.S. healthcare systems, you’ve likely had some version of this experience: you make it through early clinical champions, get strong signs of interest, and then… things slow down. The pause usually happens when the CIO team gets involved. It’s not always a hard “no,” but it becomes a long “maybe.”
That’s not unusual. In fact, it’s pretty common.
Digital health teams often frame their solution as “easy to integrate” or “secure by design,” and while that may be true technically, that’s not always how it’s received operationally. Especially in healthcare systems already stretched thin—where every new solution looks like another endpoint to manage, another project for IT to resource, another potential risk.
One way to help shift that dynamic is to align with established integration partners early in your GTM motion. Not after the sale. Not during implementation. But before procurement even begins.
Let’s walk through what that looks like, why it works, and what kinds of tradeoffs you’ll want to think through as you build this into your strategy.
CIO Objections: What’s Driving Them and Why They Matter
There’s no single reason a CIO or their team might hesitate on a new solution. But most of the friction tends to concentrate around a few key themes:
1. Integration Complexity
This is one of the first things that surfaces. Even if you’ve done integration work elsewhere, each healthcare system has a slightly different architecture, EHR footprint, and internal governance process. What looks simple in one system can feel more complicated in another—especially if it touches both inpatient and outpatient systems or spans multiple EHRs.
There’s also the issue of operational history. A CIO may have been burned in the past by vendors who underestimated the true complexity of integration. So even if your team is different, you may still be walking into skepticism that was earned by someone else.
2. Security and Compliance
Security reviews are rarely fast—and for good reason. Healthcare systems are custodians of some of the most sensitive data around. A single misstep doesn’t just create operational risk—it creates reputational and regulatory exposure.
From the CIO’s point of view, every new vendor means another third-party risk assessment, another set of APIs to monitor, another layer of PHI access to manage. This is especially true if your solution involves outbound or bidirectional data exchange from the EHR.
So, even if your tech is well-architected, the bar for trust is high.
3. Resource Allocation
Many IT teams are already running at full capacity. Even when they believe in the value of a new solution, the question becomes: can we support it?
That means your success may hinge less on the clinical impact of your solution and more on how much lift it requires from internal teams. If the integration depends heavily on scarce internal FTEs—or if it introduces ongoing support needs—it may not clear the bar, regardless of how compelling the use case is.
Where Integration Partners Help
If these concerns sound familiar, you’re not alone. Many digital health leaders run into the same roadblocks. But some of the more successful ones have found a way to get ahead of this by building their product with a clear integration partner strategy from day one.
This doesn’t mean handing off your integration work completely. It means aligning with firms that have already built trusted, repeatable pathways into the healthcare system infrastructure. By doing so, you’re not asking the CIO to take a leap of faith—you’re showing them something that’s already been de-risked.
Let’s break that down by category.
A. Streamlining Integration Complexity
This is probably the most obvious area where an integration partner creates value.
Take Redox as an example. Their platform is built to normalize and route data between your application and the EHR systems used by most major U.S. healthcare systems. Because they’ve done this work hundreds of times before, the friction that usually happens around integration timelines, data formatting, and change management can be meaningfully reduced.
From the healthcare system’s point of view, this means:
- There’s already a known process for how your data gets in and out
- The CIO team isn’t stuck trying to reinvent how integration gets done
- There’s a smaller footprint of custom code or one-off mapping to maintain
That makes it easier for your buyer to say “yes,” because they’re not buying a hope—they’re buying a proven pathway.
You can often map this visually, too. Redox maintains a public database of healthcare systems, payers, and HIEs where they’ve already integrated integrations. That gives your team a way to pre-score accounts: if Redox is already active there, you’re not starting from scratch.
B. Meeting Security and Compliance Expectations
Partners like Health Gorilla, Particle Health, or 1upHealth don’t just support integration. They operate with robust security and compliance frameworks—often with certifications like HITRUST or SOC 2 Type II already in place.
When your solution is built on top of or alongside platforms that have cleared security reviews in other systems, you’re reducing the perceived novelty—and therefore the perceived risk—of your own implementation.
This doesn’t eliminate the need for a review, but it can change the tone of the conversation. Instead of leading with, “Here’s how we protect data,” you can say, “We’re working with a platform your peers already use.”
That kind of familiarity can go a long way toward smoothing the road ahead.
C. Reducing Internal Resource Requirements
This one’s easy to underestimate—but it’s often the most critical. When a CIO team evaluates a new vendor, they’re asking: what’s the lift on our side?
Partners like ELLKAY or InterSystems have built their businesses around doing the heavy lifting. From interface development and data migration to long-term maintenance, they’ve productized the hard parts. That means the healthcare system’s internal IT team can stay focused on their own strategic priorities—not get pulled into another six-month build with an uncertain outcome.
It’s worth saying out loud: in many cases, the best technical solution doesn’t win. The solution that fits best into the resource realities of the buying organization does.
How CIOs Think About the Value of Solutions
Here’s a simple framing from the CIO’s point of view:
It’s not about the elegance of your tech. It’s about how well you reduce their exposure.
When you bring a strong integration partner to the table, it tends to show up in three ways:
Risk Mitigation
- Fewer moving parts for internal teams to manage
- Greater confidence in uptime, reliability, and system interoperability
- Reduced surface area for security issues
Operational Efficiency
- Faster implementations, with less disruption to workflows
- More consistent data exchange across care teams
- Lower support burden post-go-live
Cost Management
- Reduced internal development time
- Fewer maintenance headaches
- Better long-term total cost of ownership
From the CIO’s side, it’s about staying on budget, reducing system risk, and keeping internal teams supported without adding new complexity. When your pitch speaks directly to those metrics—and shows how your partner strategy helps support them—you’re speaking their language.
What This Means for Sales and GTM Teams
If you can defuse CIO-level concerns early, you unlock much more than just a smoother procurement path. This includes:
- Faster Sales Cycles: Champions spend less time navigating internal risk objections. Procurement timelines shrink. You get to revenue faster.
- Broader Market Access: If you’re using Redox, Health Gorilla, or InterSystems, you can proactively target accounts where those partners already have infrastructure in place. That becomes a segmentation strategy.
- Stronger Positioning: When you present your solution as part of a trusted integration model, you look more mature. You don’t just bring features—you also bring a credible operating model.
That can be the difference between getting blocked and getting bought.
Quick Profiles of Leading Integration Partners
For teams thinking about where to start, here’s a short overview of several partners commonly used in U.S. digital health:
| Name | Description |
| Redox | A widely-used integration platform with deep EHR interoperability capabilities. Strong footprint across healthcare systems. Offers a searchable integration database. |
| Particle Health | Focused on health data exchange, pulling information from across clinical records to support decision-making. Often used for payer and care management use cases. |
| 1upHealth | Built on FHIR standards, focused on population health analytics and data aggregation. Strong in public health, CMS reporting, and VBC-aligned tools. |
| Health Gorilla | Offers a full interoperability suite: FHIR APIs, master patient index, national networks. One of the first companies designated as a QHIN. |
| ELLKAY | A “connectivity as a service” provider offering interface engines, lab integrations, data migrations, and more to hospitals, health systems, laboratories, health plans, health IT companies, and ambulatory practices. |
| InterSystems | Runs HealthShare, a powerful platform for HIEs, data normalization, and cross-EHR interoperability. Often used in IDNs and regional collaboratives. |
You don’t have to pick just one. But aligning your GTM with one or two of these—especially those already active in your target market—can accelerate everything.
Do QHINs Matter?
As of March 2025, several organizations have been designated QHINs under TEFCA. These include eHealth Exchange, CommonWell, Health Gorilla, and others.
Being part of a QHIN can be helpful if your product is focused on national-scale data exchange. But it’s worth noting: QHINs serve a different function than integration platforms like Redox or ELLKAY. They focus on policy-aligned data interoperability—not always app-specific integration or workflow customization.
So depending on your product and your GTM model, a QHIN relationship evaluated alongside your integration partner strategy may be wise.
Final Thought on Healthcare System Integration Partners
There’s no shortcut to selling into healthcare systems. The process is long, complex, and risk-sensitive by nature.
But it gets a lot easier when you show up not just with a compelling solution—but with a trusted integration pathway that makes it easier for the CIO to say yes.
That’s what integration partners really offer. Not just plumbing, but confidence. And in U.S. healthcare, that might be the most valuable thing you can sell.
How I Help
I work with digital health teams selling into U.S. healthcare systems to navigate CIO objections before deals slow down.
That usually means:
- Building a partner strategy that de-risks integration
- Reframing your messaging through the buyer’s lens
- Coaching revenue teams on how healthcare systems actually buy
The goal isn’t just to get interest—it’s to get through procurement and into implementation, faster and with fewer surprises. If you need help with this, get in touch at astrunk@accretiveedge.com.
