The infrastructure layer is built. The activation layer is where most digital health initiatives still stall.
In this episode of Partner Pulse, Zak Pines sat down with Rachel Witalec, Chief Product Officer at Redox, to unpack one of healthcare's most persistent unsolved problems, not the one that gets the headlines, but the one that shows up every day in clinical and operations teams across the country. Redox published their take here. What follows goes deeper on what they covered: why the gap between data infrastructure and clinical action is still so wide, what closing it actually looks like in practice, and why the organizations making progress are treating this as an architecture problem, not a software procurement decision.
Activation is where the bottleneck actually lives now.
It's 7:45 on a Tuesday morning. A care coordinator has fourteen intakes from the weekend stacked in their queue, each one needs to be re-typed into the EHR before a clinician can see it. The data already exists. It's just trapped on the wrong side of a form, and someone has to carry it across that gap by hand, every single time. The same fields, entered twice. The same documents, moved manually. Every day.
The EHR works. The forms work. Nothing connects them.
Healthcare has spent the last decade solving the data access problem: FHIR mandates, interoperability standards, API investment, cloud data infrastructure. That work has largely paid off. Data is more accessible, more standardized, and more portable than it has ever been.
But accessible isn't the same as activated. Plenty of organizations have the infrastructure and the workflow, each one built, each one working. But many IT leads at health organizations still spend their days “waiting on the sidelines” for the connection between them: pulling data down on one side, pushing a completed document back on the other, with a person doing the carrying in between.
That connection is what Redox and Intellistack Streamline are built to close.
The infrastructure layer healthcare was missing
Redox started by helping digital health companies integrate into EHR systems. Today, they've evolved into something more foundational: a modern data infrastructure layer for healthcare data exchange between any two entities. Processing over 20 billion messages a year, Redox handles connectivity (secure, bidirectional data exchange between systems), data quality (normalizing code sets, appending patient identifiers, standardizing formats as data moves through their infrastructure), and orchestration (routing data to the right systems at the right time).
"We are really a modern data infrastructure company," says Rachel Witalec, Redox's Chief Product Officer.
Connectivity used to be the hard part. Now the hard part is what happens after the data lands: whether it's complete and accurate enough to act on, and what happens next. Redox solves the first part, not just the connection, but making sure the data is trustworthy the moment it arrives. The second part, putting it to work, is where Streamline comes in.
The activation layer, built for the people closest to care.
Intellistack Streamline is a no-code workflow automation platform designed to put EHR data in the hands of the people who actually need to act on it: clinical coordinators, operations staff, the people who run the processes, not just the engineers who configure them. Once Redox has normalized data from the EHR into a consistent FHIR format, Streamline receives it and puts it to work: pre-filling forms, routing approvals, and writing data back to the chart, without custom code, and without IT standing between a business user and a working process.
This distinction matters more than it might appear. Process automation that lives in the IT department, that requires developers to build, modify, and maintain every process, recreates the bottleneck it was supposed to solve. The clinical director who knows how intake should work, the operations lead who manages the referral process, the coordinator who sees where things fall through the cracks: these are the people who should be building and running the processes, without waiting on a developer to do it. Streamline is built for them.
Streamline was built with AI from the ground up, not bolted on after.
That means the platform handles data classification, field mapping, and error handling automatically, before a user ever has to think about it. And because PHI never sits in Streamline's infrastructure, data passes through in real time and stays in the source systems where it belongs, the compliance posture is architectural, not a configuration decision made after the fact.
"We help make sure that data actually gets activated within the Intellistack platform," Witalec explains. "And we don't just do the technical part. The Redox team actually joins the Intellistack team sometimes on prospect calls to explain to customers what this will look like, how this will work. We really act as a trusted advisor bringing our expertise to the table. We do the integrations, you can innovate on your products."
That's not a one-off courtesy: it's how the partnership shows up at the deal stage, not just after the contract's signed.
What this looks like in practice
Three processes that show up consistently across healthcare organizations working to close the gap between their EHR and their operations:
Digital intake without re-entry. A client returns for a follow-up. Their existing record pre-fills the intake form: demographics, insurance, prior history. The coordinator reviews, updates what's changed, and submits. Nothing gets re-keyed into the EHR. As one clinical operations lead described it: "The whole workflow is we prefill the form with what's already in the EHR, the user reviews and changes what they need, and it writes back, none of it gets manually edited outside the process."
Clinical documentation into the chart. Assessments, consents, and clinical forms completed in Streamline route back to the EHR through Redox, filed to the right patient record, with the right document type, without a coordinator manually uploading files at the end of a shift.
New record creation at intake. When a new client arrives with no existing EHR record, Streamline captures the intake and the completed process creates the chart entry directly. No parallel data entry. The record is accurate from day one.
In each case, the reason the process works isn't only that Streamline can build it. It's that Redox has already handled the part that breaks most integration projects: normalizing data across EHR systems with varying levels of FHIR support, each with their own field formats, patient matching logic, and HL7 behavior.
The hard problem advantage
When Witalec was asked what makes Intellistack a strong partner, her answer cut past the usual partnership language:
"We love hard problems, that unappreciated gritty work of people who need to get stuff done, to get data where it needs to go. And what we love about you guys is you brought us a hard problem. You have this no-code workflow that is different across different EHRs, different across different customers, and creating a flow that worked to create that intake form, and create it on the fly for various EHRs, was a really tough problem."
The hardest healthcare integration challenges aren't the ones with clean documentation and well-behaved APIs. They're the ones where an EHR stores patient data in ways that differ from its own specification. Where a custom HL7 field extension requires coordination between the middleware, the process layer, and the EHR vendor, not just a configuration change. Where a process that runs perfectly in one environment breaks in another because the underlying EHR logic is fundamentally different.
"We've worn those scars on Epic and Athena and ECW," Witalec says.
Integration déjà vu: the same custom field mapping problem, the same patient-matching quirks, showing up again at the next EHR, usually with none of the lessons from the last one carried over to make it faster the second time.
That institutional knowledge, knowing how these systems actually behave, not just how they're documented, is what Redox brings to joint implementations. For implementation teams working across multiple healthcare organizations, that expertise doesn't have to be rebuilt from engagement to engagement. It travels with the partnership.
For teams doing this work, having Redox as the interop partner underneath is the difference between inheriting someone else's integration debt and starting from a foundation that's already been stress-tested.
In practice, implementations follow a model that reflects this complexity honestly: one process first, scoped carefully, proven in production, then expanded. Most organizations start with intake, consent, or enrollment, a defined scope with clear EHR fields and a working write-back path, before building toward more complex use cases.
Where healthcare's digital transformation is heading. Redox sits at an unusual intersection: serving digital health vendors, EHR platforms, providers, and health plans simultaneously. That vantage point gives Witalec a clear view of what's coming.
The way integration teams work is already changing. "They're doing things in 15 minutes that used to take two days across a fragmented workflow, not because the work got simpler, but because the interface just got smarter and easier to navigate," she says. Redox's response is a headless, API-first architecture designed to meet builders wherever they're working.
At the same time, Witalec sees this demand picking up fast for exactly what Streamline is built to deliver. "We're seeing really a need for more Intellistacks," she says: "customers who have very complex workflows that they want to deliver really quickly, that need to be flexible." Supporting that need means architecture flexible enough to handle complex flows: listening for a patient admission event, pulling additional fields, enriching with a patient identifier, normalizing to FHIR, pushing to an LLM, then writing back to the EHR. "This need to support bespoke capabilities at scale, quickly: it's a massive trend. Everyone in this space is trying to get AI data ready and make it work for them."
Getting AI data ready requires two things working in sequence: infrastructure that normalizes and routes data reliably at scale, and a process automation layer that can receive that data and act on it, without code, without retaining PHI, and without requiring clinical teams to become integration engineers to participate.
The organizations making progress aren't waiting for a single platform to solve everything. They're assembling a stack where each layer does what it does best. Redox handles the infrastructure. Streamline handles the activation. And the teams closest to the care, the ones who understand the processes, the edge cases, and what happens when something breaks, are the ones building and running them, without waiting on anyone else to do it.
For implementation teams and technology partners working in healthcare, the infrastructure-plus-activation model is a repeatable delivery pattern, not a one-off integration: built once, reused across organizations and verticals. The combination of Redox's interoperability depth and Streamline's no-code process automation layer creates a repeatable path from EHR connectivity to live clinical processes, without rebuilding the integration foundation for every customer or vertical. That's what makes the difference between a point engagement and a practice.
Streamline the workflows behind the care. Reclaim the work that matters.
