The Standard

 Join two live webinars featuring the 2026 HL7 AI Challenge winners and see how
AI and HL7 standards are being applied to real-world healthcare challenges. 

What does healthcare AI look like when it moves beyond experimentation and into practical, real-world applications?

The winners of the second annual HL7 AI Challengeoffer a glimpse into that future, demonstrating how artificial intelligence and HL7® standards can work together to improve data quality, strengthen clinical intelligence, support better workflows, and make health information more accessible and actionable.

Now, the HL7 community has an opportunity to see these solutions in action.

HL7 International will host two free AI Challenge Winners Showcase webinars on October 14 and October 28, featuring live demonstrations and presentations from the award-winning teams. Moderated by Daniel Vreeman, DPT, HL7 Chief Standards Development Officer and Chief AI Officer, the sessions will take participants behind the solutions and explore how teams are applying AI and interoperability standards to real healthcare challenges.

A Global Look at AI and Interoperability

The 2026 HL7 AI Challenge attracted 73 submissions from 25 countries, more than double the number of entries received during the inaugural Challenge in 2025.

Individuals, companies, academic and research institutions, government organizations, nonprofits, and teams worldwide were invited to demonstrate AI solutions that leverage HL7 standards to improve health, healthcare, and public health.

This year’s awardees tackled a wide range of challenges, including fragmented patient information, clinical decision support, data quality, chronic disease management, AI transparency, and the development of new FHIR®-enabled applications.

“AI innovation in healthcare cannot happen in isolation from the data and infrastructure that support it,” said Daniel Vreeman, DPT, Chief Standards Development Officer and Chief AI Officer of HL7 International. “The solutions recognized through this year’s Challenge demonstrate the many ways innovators are putting HL7 standards to work alongside AI, from improving data quality and clinical intelligence to enabling new applications and workflows.”

The two showcase webinars provide an opportunity to go beyond the award announcements and hear directly from the people who built these solutions.

CMS, ONC & Industry Leaders Deliver Comprehensive ePA Update Sept. 30

Electronic prior authorization (ePA) has moved beyond concept and pilot testing. Payers, providers, and vendors are now actively in production or building toward production. That shift raises a natural question for the industry: where does the industry stand today, and what's the path from here?

Join the HL7 Da Vinci Project for the September Community Roundtable on Wednesday, September 30, 2026, from 4 – 5:30 p.m. ET. This session will provide a concise overview of the latest regulatory and policy developments, including updates on federal activities, followed by the current status of the Da Vinci Prior Authorization Implementation Guides, pilots and related resources that are helping organizations prepare for implementation.

Featured Presenters

• Karen Ashton, MultiCare Connected Care
• Michael Gould, ZeOmega and HL7 Da Vinci Project Architecture Group
• David Koppel, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS)
• Lloyd McKenzie, Dogwood Health Consulting and HL7 Da Vinci Project
• Jeffery Smith, Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC)
• Denise St. Clair, Global Alliant Inc and HL7 Da Vinci Project PMO
• Moderator: Casey Thompson, HL7 Da Vinci Project Program Coordinator; Consultant, Point-of-Care Partners

Participants will learn about industry readiness efforts, implementation support resources, and the growing ecosystem of tools available through Da Vinci. The session will explore the latest ePA capabilities, including current and emerging implementation guide versions, highlighting how organizations are advancing from planning to real-world deployment.

The program concludes with a panel discussion where panelists will share lessons learned, discuss known implementation challenges, explore how industry stakeholders are collaborating to achieve scalable success, and provide insight into the evolution of standards and future versions of the Da Vinci implementation guides.

Whether your organization is just beginning its ePA journey or already moving into production, this session will provide practical guidance, implementation perspectives, and a clear view of where electronic prior authorization is headed next.

Our recent HL7 FAST webinar, “Building the Consent Trust Stack: Scaling Privacy, Patient Choice and Data Exchange Across Healthcare,” reinforced an important point for our industry:

Computable consent is more than converting a paper form into structured digital data; it provides the infrastructure for trusted, policy-aware data exchange.

As healthcare becomes increasingly connected across providers, payers, HIEs, national networks, state ecosystems, and consumer applications, we face a fundamental challenge: How do we enable information to move while ensuring that all data holders understand and consistently apply the patient’s choices, applicable privacy laws, and other conditions governing the use and disclosure of that information?

That challenge is becoming more urgent as federal and state privacy requirements continue to intersect with sensitive information such as behavioral health, substance use disorder, reproductive health, and other categories of data. At the same time, patients increasingly expect greater control over what is shared, with whom, for what purpose, and for how long. Manual workflows and scanned consent forms were never designed to support that environment. Automation is essential to sharing large volumes of data with the right, authorized parties: providers, payers, caregivers, researchers, and others.

Consent Must Become Operational

FAST Consent Co-Lead Mohammad Jafari walked through the architecture required to move from capturing a patient's preference to enforcing that preference within a data-access workflow.

A scalable environment must discover applicable patient consent, validate whether it remains active, determine whether patient consent is required for the transaction, request patient consent when it does not exist, evaluate the resulting permissions in the context of applicable privacy rules and other policies, and ultimately connect those decisions to authorization and enforcement.

This is where the distinction between simply having consent and having computable consent becomes critical.

The FAST Scalable Consent Managementapproach defines the exchange patterns needed to manage the consent lifecycle across systems; it does not define or prescribe the content of the consent itself. These patterns support requesting, reviewing, and recording a patient’s consent decision—whether the underlying consent content is computable or non-computable—as well as revocation, delegation, provenance, auditing, and communication of consent-status changes across repositories throughout the ecosystem.

One particularly important capability now being finalized is the use of FHIR Subscriptions for consent events. Rather than organizations repeatedly checking whether a consent has changed, systems can be notified when consent is granted, revoked, replaced, delegated, or expires. This allows EHRs, HIEs, payers, networks, and applications to remain synchronized with the patient's current decision, ensuring the patient’s consent preferences are consistent throughout their care journey. FAST plans to continue testing this capability at the September HL7 Connectathon.

Three Industry Leaders Highlight Best Practices on August 26

As health data exchange expands nationwide, overcoming technical and operational barriers requires strong cross-industry alignment. Establishing scalable, patient-centered interoperability depends on bridging the gaps between technical standards, policy efforts, and practical implementation.

Join the HL7 Da Vinci Project for the August Community Roundtable on Wednesday, August 26, 2026 from 4 – 5:30 p.m. ET, featuring industry leaders from the HL7 Da Vinci Project, The Sequoia Project’s Interoperability Matters initiative and FHIR at Scale Taskforce (FAST). Hear exclusive updates on recent Da Vinci milestones and community engagement opportunities, followed by an in-depth panel discussion on how real-world collaboration enables scalable health data exchange.

Featured Presenters

• Didi Davis, Vice President, Informatics, Conformance & Interoperability, The Sequoia Project
• Janice Reese, FAST Program Manager; Senior Consultant, Point-of-Care Partners
• Casey Thompson, HL7 Da Vinci Project Program Coordinator; Consultant, Point-of-Care Partners

Uniting Standards, Policy, and Implementation

Attendees will gain actionable implementation experiences, lessons learned, and emerging best practices to build trusted, scalable infrastructure and align workflows with regulatory requirements. The discussion will highlight how cross-industry collaboration overcomes critical friction points, including patient identity, authorization, consent, endpoint discovery, data quality, data usability, and workflow alignment, while opening practical opportunities to participate in upcoming pilots and testing.

Key takeaways include:

• Why scalable, secure infrastructure matters for nationwide exchange
• How technical standards and clinical workflows work together in practice
• The pivotal role of data quality and usability in meaningful interoperability
• Opportunities to participate in real-world testing and pilots
• Actionable ways to learn more and get involved in ongoing initiatives

Whether you are a payer, provider organization, health IT vendor, or regulatory stakeholder, this session offers emerging best practices and practical lessons learned to support compliance, boost efficiency, and improve patient-centered data exchange.

Free Webinar on August 13 at 11:30 am ET

As healthcare data exchange continues to expand, building trust has become just as important as building interoperability. Patients expect their privacy preferences to be respected, organizations need confidence that consent directives can be enforced consistently, and data must move securely across an increasingly connected healthcare ecosystem.

Join theHL7® FHIR® at Scale Taskforce (FAST), HL7 International, Shift Collaborative, and The Sequoia Project Privacy & Consent Workgroup on August 13 for Building the Consent Trust Stack: Scaling Privacy, Patient Choice, and Data Exchange Across Healthcare. This webinar introduces the FAST Scalable Consent Management Implementation Guide and explores how computable consent can transform patient choices into standards-based, actionable data exchange.

Why Computable Consent Matters

As healthcare organizations exchange more data across providers, payers, health information networks, public health agencies, and patients, consent management must evolve beyond paper forms and manual processes.

Traditional consent models often rely on static documents and organization-specific workflows that are difficult to interpret, share, and enforce across systems. Computable consent changes that by representing patient choices in a structured, machine-readable format that can be discovered, understood, and applied automatically wherever health information is exchanged.

The FAST Scalable Consent Management Implementation Guide provides a standards-based approach to making consent more interoperable, discoverable, enforceable, and scalable, which strengthens patient trust while supporting secure, policy-aware data exchange. 

The HL7® Da Vinci Project is proud to recognize five outstanding healthcare technology leaders as its 2025 Da Vinci Community Champions. These individuals have demonstrated exceptional leadership in advancing healthcare interoperability, fostering collaboration, and driving the real-world implementation of HL7® Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®) standards.

As an HL7 FHIR Accelerator, the Da Vinci Project brings together organizations across the healthcare ecosystem to improve care delivery through standards-based data exchange. By accelerating FHIR adoption, Da Vinci helps reduce administrative burden, automate workflows, support value-based care, and ultimately improve health outcomes.

Recognizing Leaders Advancing Healthcare Interoperability

Each year, the Da Vinci Community Champions program honors individuals whose contributions embody the collaborative spirit that drives the project forward. Nominated by their peers, these champions represent the diverse voices of the Da Vinci community—including health plans, health systems, accountable care organizations (ACOs), government agencies, and health IT vendors.

Their work helps shape and implement practical FHIR-based solutions that make healthcare more connected, efficient, and patient-centered.

The 2025 HL7 Da Vinci Community Champions are:

• Chris Cioffi, IT Business System Analyst Senior Advisor, Elevance Health
• Durwin Day, Health Information Manager, Health Care Service Corporation (HCSC) – Retired
• Lorraine Doo, Director, Health Informatics and Interoperability Group, Office of Healthcare Experience and Interoperability, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) – Retired
• November Valentine, Software Developer, Payer Platform, Epic
• Jason Vogt, Manager, Development – Interoperability API & Structured Documents, MEDITECH

"Honorees were nominated by peers across the Da Vinci community, making the recognition especially meaningful," said Anna Taylor, chair of the HL7 Da Vinci Project Steering Committee and associate vice president of population health and value-based care at MultiCare Connected Care.

Taylor also reflected on the loss of one of this year's honorees.

"This year's announcement is bittersweet, as one of our Champions, Durwin Day, recently passed away. His decades-long leadership and foundational contributions to the HL7 Da Vinci Project leave a legacy and lasting impact on standards-based data exchange across the healthcare ecosystem as well as our Da Vinci community."

Join the HL7 Da Vinci Project for the June Community Roundtable on Wednesday, June 24, 2026 from 4 – 5:30 p.m. ET, when representatives from the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association (BCBSA) and Itiliti Health will share a compelling case study in policy digitization and HL7 FHIR® questionnaire standardization aligned to the Da Vinci Documentation Templates and Rules (DTR) Implementation Guide.

Featured Presenters

• Dr. Razia Hashmi, MD, MPH, FAAFP, Vice President of Clinical Affairs, Blue Cross Blue Shield Association
• Michael Lunzer, Co-Founder and CEO, Itiliti Health
• Casey Thompson, HL7 Da Vinci Project Program Coordinator; Consultant, Point-of-Care Partners
• Moderator: Alix Goss, HL7 Da Vinci Project Program Manager; Senior Consultant, Point-of-Care Partners

From Policy to Practice: A Scalable Approach to DTR

Before diving into the technical session, the Da Vinci Project will provide a few updates and recognize the 2025 HL7 Da Vinci Project Community Champions. These individuals’ display the unique traits of “industry above self, a passion for making the healthcare system work better, supporting others, and promoting change.”

The heart of the June session is a real-world case study exploring how BCBSA is digitizing and centralizing reference medical policies and aligning them to standardized HL7 FHIR Questionnaires built on the Da Vinci DTR Implementation Guide. This reusable approach improves consistency in provider documentation collection while preserving local autonomy for implementation decisions. Topics will include:

• How policy digitization enables questionnaire creation
• Key considerations for distributing standardized DTR questionnaires
• Governance and quality guardrails that support scale

Whether you're a payer advancing DTR adoption, a vendor building questionnaire tooling, or a provider organization preparing for what's ahead, this session offers concrete, actionable insights from organizations that have already done the work.

Join the Discussion

📅 Date: Wednesday, June 24, 2026
🕓 Time: 4:00 – 5:30 p.m. ET
💻 Location: Virtual (Free & open to the public)
🔗 Register here: https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_f4TEb4cYSKe4koDNyrvdpg#/registration

We encourage you to review prior sessions' recordings for additional context.

The HL7® FHIR® at Scale Taskforce (FAST) and the CARIN Alliance are joining forces to deliver the next generation of interoperable digital identity for U.S. healthcare. Together, we are aligning FAST Identity STU 3 with the CARIN Digital Trust Framework so that patients, providers, payers, and the networks that connect them can rely on a single, consistent foundation of trust as the CMS Aligned Networks ecosystem comes online.

This is more than a technical collaboration. It is a strategic commitment by two of the most active organizations in U.S. health data exchange to ensure the trust layer beneath nationwide interoperability is open, interoperable, and ready for scale.

Why This Partnership, Why Now

The CMS Health Technology Ecosystem and the Aligned Networks Pledge have raised the bar for what “connected” means in healthcare in the United States. Twenty-one networks have already committed to meeting the CMS Interoperability Framework criteria — and every one of them needs a way to answer a deceptively simple question every time data moves: who is on the other end of this transaction, and can we trust them?

FAST has spent years building the scalable, FHIR-based infrastructure that answers that question — identity matching, certificate-based trust, federated directories, and computable consent. The CARIN Alliance has spent equal effort building the policy fabric that makes credentials portable across organizations. The CARIN Digital Identity Credential Policy, published in September 2025, defines an open trust framework that lets credentials issued by one Credential Service Provider be recognized and accepted by another — grounded in NIST SP 800-63 identity assurance levels, NIST 800-53 controls, and the RFC 3647 policy structure used by mature certificate ecosystems.

The opportunity before us is to wire these two efforts together — not in parallel, but as a single, coherent stack that the industry can adopt.

What We Are Building Together: FAST Identity STU 3

FAST Identity STU 2 was published in December 2025, delivering implementer-validated guidance for identity matching across organizational boundaries using FHIR Patient, Person, and RelatedPerson profiles, the FHIR $match operation, and the HL7 Person Identifier as a persistent, interoperable identifier for longitudinal correlation.

FAST Identity STU 3 picks up where STU 2 left off. Working hand in hand with the CARIN Alliance, we are extending the implementation guide so that:

• FHIR-based identity workflows are bound to externally accredited identity assurance, so that an IAL2 or IAL3 credential issued can be recognized and honored anywhere in the FAST ecosystem, without each relying party performing its own independent evaluation.
• Federated workflows align with Tiered OAuth, OpenID Federation, and identity broker patterns — the same building blocks CARIN identifies as foundational to cross-framework reciprocity.
• Identity resolution scales across consumers, providers, payers, and applications, so that participants can prove who they are once and be trusted everywhere a FAST-conformant network reaches.

The result is a clear, implementable path from verified human or organization all the way to FHIR data exchanged with the right party, under the right consent, on the right network.

Summary

HL7 International embraces artificial intelligence as a powerful enabling technology for health data interoperability. Rather than restricting AI use of our standards, we are actively engineering our processes and content to be AI-ready. We believe that AI systems capable of understanding FHIR® and other HL7 standards ultimately serve our mission to improve health and well-being through better data exchange.

Our Perspective: Open Standards = Open Possibilities

HL7 International's mission is to create and promote the adoption of innovative interoperability standards that improve health and well-being while fostering a diverse and inclusive global community. We pursue this so that people everywhere can live in optimal health. Because open standards enable new digital freedoms, we want our standards to be as widely used and as deeply understood as possible. By humans and machines alike. Standards demonstrate the network effect — they become more valuable the more widely they are adopted.

Some standards development organizations (SDOs) restrict or prohibit the use of their intellectual property in AI training and inference. HL7 International takes a different approach. We view AI systems as legitimate and valuable consumers of our standards — partners in the global project of interoperability rather than threats to our business model.

Our licensing choices reflect this view. HL7 publishes our FHIR platform standard and related specifications under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) public domain dedication, the most permissive licensing approach available. CC0 reflects a deliberate strategic commitment: by removing all licensing barriers, we maximize adoption potential and minimize friction for all implementers, including AI developers and the AI systems they build.

FHIR in the Wild: Standards-Aware AI Systems

HL7's flagship FHIR standard is unique not only as a modern API standard for healthcare, with innovations in open standards development, but also in its structure and publication format. FHIR reflects a fundamentally developer-native approach, setting it apart from most other health IT standards. Rather than static, paywalled PDFs, FHIR is published as a fully navigable website where every resource, data type, and operation has its own structured page — paired with computable, machine-readable definitions in JSON and XML that allow tools to programmatically interrogate the standard itself. Further, the platform specification and derivative implementation guides, along with their computable parts, are distributed as versioned NPM packages via a public registry, enabling reproducible builds and automated dependency resolution familiar to any software developer.

Additionally, we have embraced the expectation of co-developing and testing an open-source (typically licensed under Apache 2.0) reference implementation software alongside the standard. This ensures that the published standard is actually implementable, and gives implementers working software to learn from, test their code against, or even incorporate into their products.

Because FHIR is freely available, extensively documented online, and has corresponding open source reference software code bases on public platforms like Github, FHIR is already embedded in the training corpora of the world's leading large language models. Developers today can ask an AI assistant to generate a FHIR patient resource, write a FHIR search query, or explain the semantics of a SMART on FHIR authorization flow — and receive accurate, useful answers. This is a natural consequence of our open-first standards strategy at work.

In short, we see the standard not as a document to be read, but as an open platform to be built upon.

Today we honor the life and legacy of Clement J. McDonald, MD, who passed away on May 21, 2026.

Known worldwide as the one and only "Clem", he was a luminary in the field of biomedical informatics. Clem was a titan, world renowned for his innovations in electronic medical records, clinical decision support, multi-institution health data exchange, and especially in the global standards that enable computers to share and understand health data.

As a co-founder and life-long member of HL7 International, Clem's vision for interoperability enabled by consensus standards is encoded in our DNA.

A Pioneering Career

Clem grew up on Chicago's West Side, graduated from Notre Dame in three years, and attended the University of Illinois College of Medicine. He completed his internal medicine residency at Cook County Hospital and the University of Wisconsin, after which he joined Indiana University and the Regenstrief Institute in 1972. There he built one of the world's first electronic medical record systems and published the first randomized controlled trials demonstrating that computerized clinical decision support could improve care.

He rose through the academic ranks at the Indiana University School of Medicine to become Distinguished Professor of Medicine and the Sam Regenstrief Professor of Medical Informatics, and served as Director of the Regenstrief Institute from 1990 to 2006. He also developed the Indiana Network for Patient Care, a groundbreaking statewide health information exchange. Throughout this time, he also practiced primary care internal medicine in a safety-net clinic for more than 25 years (that ran on the EMR he created).

In 2004, Clem joined the U.S. National Library of Medicine where he first served as Director of the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications and Scientific Director of its intramural research program, and later serving as Chief Health Data Standards Officer — a position he held until his passing.