Introducing Banterop: Testbed for Language-First Interoperability :-) We've…
View on LinkedInIntroducing Banterop: Testbed for Language-First Interoperability :-) We’ve historically advanced healthcare interoperability by defining structured data models and workflow-anchored API transactions. This approach struggles with the long tail of diverse healthcare interactions (and if we’re being honest: also struggles with the center of the distribution). What if, instead of pre-defining every detail, we could enable systems to negotiate requirements and share knowledge to get jobs done in real time?
This is the core question behind “Language-First Interoperability” (LFI). At the upcoming HL7 Connectathon in Pittsburgh, Mark Kramer and I are excited to bring this concept into the HL7 community for early-stage, hands-on testing.
This track has an exploratory spirit, reminiscent of the early days of FHIR. We’re not bringing a finished solution; we’re bringing a hypothesis and a set of open questions that we hope to explore with the community. What are the common failure modes of agent-to-agent conversations? How do we ensure reliability? What are the right patterns for grounding agentic interactions in high-quality data and user preferences? We expect challenges and failures, and that’s precisely what will make the track a success — because we will learn from them.
To facilitate exploration, I’ve developed Banterop: an open reference platform and testbed. For background, see this intro video: https://lnkd.in/gfHVBsx4?
The platform’s scenarios focus on common, information-asymmetric interactions where one agent has deep knowledge of a patient’s clinical history and the other holds the rules, policies, or eligibility criteria for a specific process. Think of a clinician’s agent interacting with an agent for a payer, a clinical trial, or a public health registry. The goal is to lower the barrier to entry, allowing participants to bring their own technology (whether it’s a client or a server, using Agent-to-Agent or Model Context Protocols) and immediately begin testing against a simulated counterpart to see how they negotiate a path to a decision. This is an experiment in building more adaptable and intelligent health IT infrastructure. If you’re interested in the intersection of LLMs, interoperability, and real-world healthcare processes, come and roll up your sleeves!
Learn more and get involved:
Connectathon Track Details: https://lnkd.in/g-cnk4U9
“Intro to Banterop Platform: https://lnkd.in/giGFgEgJ