Trek Health’s Integration Strategy: Overcoming Legacy Tech Barriers in Healthcare

Healthcare technology isn’t just outdated – it’s frozen in time. The infrastructure processing today’s healthcare transactions was implemented when Ronald Reagan was president. For Trek Health, building a modern payments platform meant first understanding how to work with systems that predate the internet itself.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Trek Health’s founder Dilpreet Sahota revealed their strategy for navigating this technical maze, offering valuable insights for founders tackling legacy industries.

The Legacy Challenge

The root of healthcare’s technical debt runs deep. “The way that all of these transactions are processed within healthcare in the United States today is based on this X twelve infrastructure that was implemented a little over 40 years ago,” Dilpreet explains. This aging infrastructure wasn’t designed for today’s scale or complexity.

The result? Mountains of unstructured data flowing through antiquated pipelines. As Dilpreet notes, “There’s been so many bandits that have been put on the system over the years that today, the reality of the situation is that of the $4 trillion that are spent in healthcare in the US… $1 trillion every year is spent specifically on healthcare admin.”

The Integration Reality

For Trek Health, the technical challenge became clear during implementation. “Data interoperability within healthcare is quite lacking,” Dilpreet shares. “Many of the practice management systems or EHR systems that these groups have within their stack today… don’t have APIs.”

This lack of modern integration points forces creative solutions. Some systems can only export CSV reports. Others require remote process automation or screen scraping to build integrations. It’s not ideal, but it’s the reality of working with healthcare technology.

Building for Both Worlds

Trek Health’s approach to this challenge is pragmatic. Rather than trying to force healthcare providers to adopt entirely new systems, they built solutions that could work with existing infrastructure while gradually introducing modern capabilities.

This strategy has proven successful across their client base, from small practices to venture-backed startups operating in 15 states. “Our client is the owner of a practice, generally, that wants to clean up this process and wants to streamline as many of these workflows as they can,” Dilpreet explains.

The Automation Goal

The ultimate aim isn’t just to integrate with legacy systems, but to automate the processes they handle. “Today a large chunk of transactions that we’re processing on behalf of our providers are quite manual,” says Dilpreet. “What we want to aim to is have less than 10% of total transactions that our team is processing require any sort of human input whatsoever.”

This represents a massive shift from the current state, where “almost all transactions require some sort of human input.” Achieving this level of automation requires building bridges between old and new technologies while maintaining reliability and compliance.

Key Integration Principles

Trek Health’s experience offers several lessons for founders tackling legacy tech integration:

1. Don’t fight the infrastructure – build solutions that work within existing constraints
2. Be prepared to support multiple integration methods, from APIs to CSV imports
3. Focus on reducing manual work, even when full automation isn’t immediately possible
4. Build solutions that can scale from small implementations to enterprise deployments

For B2B founders entering markets with entrenched technology, Trek Health’s approach shows that success often requires meeting systems where they are while building toward where they should be. As Dilpreet puts it, “We want to make that instant, and we want to enable that through the Internet.”

The goal isn’t just to integrate with legacy systems, but to gradually transform them through automation and improved efficiency. This patient, pragmatic approach to modernization might not be as exciting as wholesale disruption, but it’s often the most effective path to achieving meaningful change in regulated industries.