Most healthcare professionals are frustrated by the lagging progress of health IT. In an era when Google and Facebook seem to know every detail of our lives, why can’t health IT do a better job of predicting the information needs of patients and clinicians? Or even modify their data displays based on clinical context? One reason is the nonstandardized nature of most healthcare data. Pam Banning has spent her career making health data more usable through standardized terminologies such as LOINC and SNOMED. In this conversation she describes how far we’ve come using semantic interoperability over the past 25 years, and why we still have a very long way to go.