For more than a decade, one handle has been shorthand for a single, stubborn idea: that healthcare interoperability is not a milestone you reach — it is a practice you sustain. This page profiles Mario Hyland — known across the HL7 and federal health IT communities as @interopguy — and the body of work that turned Continuous Interoperability into the way we future‑proof healthcare's integrated ecosystem.
Mario Hyland founded AEGIS.net, Inc. as a small business committed to a then‑unfashionable idea: that interoperability is something you practice, not something you prove once. From that conviction grew the AEGIS Developers Integration Lab (DIL), the Touchstone testing platform, and a community of practice that now spans payers, providers, EHR vendors, federal agencies, and standards bodies on three continents.
As Senior Vice President AEGIS founder, Mario is proud that AEGIS is known as a premier provider of IT consulting services to federal civilian, defense, and commercial clients. But ask anyone in the HL7 hallways: Mario's contribution is less about a company and more about a vocabulary. Continuous Interoperability. The Integrated Ecosystem. Test‑Driven Development. Quality Assurance Infusion. Test early, test often, beyond the happy path.
Mario engages routinely with ACT‑IAC, AFCEA, ANSI, HIMSS and HL7. He has previously held positions with the HL7 Architecture Board (ARB), helping shape how HL7 standards related to each other and to the implementations that ultimately matter at the bedside. Senior leadership at HL7, The Sequoia Project, AMDIS, AMA, AHIMA, HIMSS, IHE USA and IHE International — alongside the VA, DoD, and HHS — have all sought his guidance on how to future‑proof the healthcare integrated ecosystem.
To the broader community, Mario is simply @interopguy — a name that, like the best Twitter handles of the early 2010s, became a brand and then an identity. It signals a point of view: that interoperability is not a feature, not a checkbox, and not a slogan. It is a discipline, practiced continuously.
Interoperability is not a certificate you earn. It is a discipline you sustain — every release, every standard revision, every new partner in the integrated ecosystem.
Long before “continuous” was the prefix to many software processes, Mario Hyland was making the case for it in healthcare interoperability. During multiple speaking appearances at industry venues like the HIMSS Interoperability Showcase, his standing topic has been the same: “Continuous Interoperability Challenges and Solutions.” The phrasing matters. Continuous, because health IT does not stand still — standards version, payloads evolve, regulations shift, partners come and go. Challenges and Solutions, because the goal is not to debate the problem but to ship answers.
The framework he calls the Integrated Ecosystem is the natural consequence of that stance. Senior leadership at HL7, The Sequoia Project, AMDIS, AMA, AHIMA, HIMSS, IHE USA and IHE International — together with federal agencies including the VA, DoD, and HHS — have sought his guidance on how a national health data infrastructure can be designed to future‑proof itself: not by predicting every change, but by building in the testing, monitoring, and feedback loops that let it absorb change without breaking.
Touchstone is the embodiment of that idea. ONC describes the platform as delivering “continuous and objective FHIR conformance measurements” as implementations evolve. Its tagline is not aspirational — it is operational:
Conceived and launched at the HL7 Plenary in Atlanta in November 2015, alongside FHIR Connectathon 10. Today, Touchstone anchors the AEGIS cloud‑based, FHIR workflow validation ecosystem that has hosted over 2 million FHIR test executions for thousands of users world-wide.
Touchstone was engineered from the ground up around the FHIR TestScript resource — a specification the AEGIS team co‑authored and continues to advance. It turned ad‑hoc interoperability checks into first‑class, executable, version‑controlled artifacts of the FHIR standard itself.
The AEGIS Developers Integration Lab — a synthetic sandbox simulating real‑world healthcare communities — predated FHIR and established the “test early, test often” paradigm that Touchstone would later carry into the FHIR era.
Previously served on the HL7 ARB, helping define the coherent architecture among HL7 work products and their relationships to other standards — with a deliberate focus on bringing testability into the architectural conversation, not bolting it on afterwards.
A fixture at HL7 FHIR Connectathons since the earliest events, with AEGIS Touchstone often serving as the test harness for several tracks, Mario has ensured that the AEGIS team has provided hands-on support to all HL7 and CMS FHIR Connectathons.
AEGIS is a Founding Premier Member of HL7's FHIR At Scale Taskforce (FAST), alongside HHS, ONC, CMS, and leading industry players — working to remove infrastructure barriers to nationwide FHIR adoption.
Iterative testing remains at the heart of agile development.
AEGIS was a key contributor at Connectathon 10, enabling developers to test their FHIR implementations.
Working with the AEGIS team gives us flexibility for an important part of the MedMij program.
This FHIR thing looks like it may be catching on — build me a FHIR server.