The Standard

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.

Co-authored by Kevin Day, Consent Implementation Guide Co-Lead, FAST FHIR Accelerator

MEET MARIA

Maria is 62 and just home from the hospital after a procedure that requires careful follow-up. Her care team has discharged her with medications, recovery instructions, and a treatment plan her health plan put in place to manage cost. Her husband took time off work to help her recover at home—administering medications, watching for warning signs, coordinating with the visiting home health nurse, and calling the health plan when questions came up about coverage and the treatment plan.

There is one complication. Decades ago, before Maria met her husband, she received sensitive care she has chosen not to share with him; care that is in her medical record and always will be. So when the hospital asked Maria at discharge whether she wanted to grant her husband access to her clinical information, she faced a binary choice: all or nothing. There was no option to share the medications and care plan he needed while keeping the rest of her history private. The system doesn't support that nuance, so Maria selected nothing.

Her husband helps her recover with whatever Maria can tell him in the moment—what each pill is for, when the next appointment is, and what the home health nurse said. When he calls the health plan to ask why one therapy was authorized but another was not, he is told he is not on the consent and the conversation cannot continue. The clinical care suffers. So does the emotional care. Two weeks in, he is frustrated, and Maria is exhausted from carrying both her recovery and the running translation of her own chart.

Maria’s story is not unusual. Across the country, patients, providers, payers, and the family members who do the actual work of recovery face a quiet crisis hiding inside healthcare’s interoperability progress: the problem of consent.

The Hidden Roadblock: When Consent Doesn’t Scale

Healthcare interoperability has made remarkable strides. Data can now move faster, further, and more securely than ever before. Yet one foundational challenge continues to limit what that progress can achieve: how patient consent is captured, communicated, and enforced across organizations.

Today, consent is fragmented. A patient authorizes data sharing at one organization, but that authorization rarely travels with the data. In the context of data privacy and consent, a “policy” is the set of provisions that govern a specific grantor–grantee relationship—what may be disclosed, to whom, for what purpose, for how long, and under what conditions. Those provisions also drive enforcement decisions when consents conflict, such as when an additive permission from one source overlaps with a restriction from another. The operational burden of capturing them varies widely depending on the setting. In clinical environments, consent is typically tied to an encounter or event, such as a 30-minute office visit or a three-week inpatient stay, and expires when that event ends. Health plans, by contrast, capture consent that remains valid until a specified expiration date or until the patient revokes it. The result is a tangled consent relationship tree, where each branch—provider, payer, app, caregiver, personal representative—holds a different fragment of the patient’s intent, with different lifespans, scopes, and enforcement rules. Because no two systems interpret these provisions the same way, organizations fall back on manual review to reconcile conflicts, slowing workflows to a crawl at the exact moments when trust matters most. Compliance burden rises. Patients are left in the dark about how their information is used. And interoperability stalls precisely where it should accelerate.

This is the problem the HL7® FHIR® at Scale Taskforce (FAST) set out to solve.

May Community Roundtable on May 27 Offers More Insight into Proposed Rule and Payer Data Exchange

As the industry prepares for the next wave of healthcare interoperability, the HL7 Da Vinci Project is dedicated to providing the community with the insights and tools necessary for success. With newly proposed regulatory frameworks, the stakes for technical and operational alignment have never been higher. Join us for the May Community Roundtable on Wednesday, May 27, 2026, from 4 – 5:30 p.m. ET to prepare for what’s next.

What You’ll Learn

While our April session established the foundational context for the new federal rule (CMS-0062-P), the May session builds on the momentum by moving from initial impressions to active implementation strategies. We will provide a focused update of the community’s considerations regarding the 2026 Interoperability Standards and Prior Authorization for Drugs proposed rule, specifically focusing on the Payer Data Exchange (PDex), PDex Plan Net, and Member Attribution (ATR) List Implementation Guides (IGs) called out in the rule.

Real-World Perspectives & Demonstrations

Following the policy discussion, you will hear directly from implementers successfully deploying these standards in real-world payer environments:

• Onyx: Discover how their implementations focus on moving data out of silos into standardized formats, providing endpoints for payers to make data available via HL7 FHIR IGs.
• Availity: Watch a live demo of core PDex workflows, including member matching and data retrieval, and learn how a centralized network can reduce onboarding friction while preserving payer autonomy and PDex semantics.

Our presenters will share critical insights on scalability and how these implementations support broader policy goals around data access, care coordination, and patient empowerment.

Upcoming Da Vinci Community Roundtable on April 29 at 4:00 pm ET

The momentum for healthcare interoperability continues to accelerate. Following the CMS-0057-F final rule, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) have introduced its next major regulatory step: the 2026 Interoperability Standards and Prior Authorization for Drugs Proposed Rule (CMS-0062-P).

Join the HL7 Da Vinci Project for the April Community Roundtable happening on Wednesday, April 29, 2026 at 4 p.m. ET as we break down this new proposal and discuss its implications for HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources® (FHIR®) implementation and the industry at large. The new proposed rule relies heavily on the work of the HL7 Da Vinci Project community and could bring significant changes for industry, including adding Da Vinci implementation guides to Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) requirements.

Featured Speakers

• Denise St. Clair: HL7 Da Vinci Project PMO; Vice President, Health Policy & Interoperability, Global Alliant, Inc.
• Alix Goss: Program Manager, HL7 Da Vinci Project; Senior Consultant, Point-of-Care Partners
• Moderator: Casey Thompson: HL7 Da Vinci Project Program Coordinator; Consultant, Point-of-Care Partners

If you’ve spent any time in healthcare over the past year, you’ve probably felt it: the energy, the urgency, the curiosity around AI. Everywhere you look, teams are experimenting with new models, exploring new use cases and imagining what care could look like if we finally had the right data in the right place at the right time.

But there’s also a shared realization emerging across the industry that AI can’t transform healthcare unless the data behind it is trustworthy, connected and interoperable.

That’s why HL7 International launched the 2026 HL7 AI Challenge, now officially open for submissions through June 30, 2026.

Why an HL7 AI Challenge?

Last year’s inaugural Challenge showed us something powerful: when innovators build on HL7 standards, they can move faster, scale more easily and create solutions that actually work in the messy, real‑world environments where healthcare happens.

Healthcare organizations around the world are experimenting with AI, but many face the same barriers: fragmented data, inconsistent formats, and limited ability to integrate AI outputs into clinical systems. HL7’s standards are designed to address these challenges, making them a natural foundation for safe and effective AI adoption.

The HL7 AI Challenge aims to:

• Encourage innovation grounded in open, widely adopted standards
• Demonstrate how structured, interoperable data improves AI performance
• Highlight real‑world solutions that can scale across organizations and borders

Healthcare interoperability has reached an inflection point.

In 2026, success is no longer defined by the presence of APIs but by the ability tooperate securely, consistently, and at scale across networks, organizations, and increasingly, across borders.

This shift reframes interoperability as something far more consequential:
a shared trust problem spanning cybersecurity, financial sustainability, and patient safety.

At the center of this transformation is FAST Security, emerging not simply as a technical specification, but as thefoundational trust layer for a global healthcare ecosystem.

Interoperability Is Now a Cybersecurity Surface

As healthcare exchange accelerates—payer-to-payer data sharing, automated prior authorization, and network-based access—organizations are no longer just exposing APIs.

They are expanding an identity and authorization attack surface.

Each new connection introduces:

• Additional credentials to manage
• Increasingly complex authorization logic
• More exceptions and edge cases
• Greater exposure to misconfiguration and attack

This is not a scaling API problem; it is a scaling trust problem.

FAST Security directly addresses this by standardizing how trust is established, enforced, and audited across organizational boundaries.

FAST Security as the Foundation of Trust Architecture

FAST Security is not designed to operate in isolation.

It provides the core trust workflows—authentication, authorization, and onboarding—that enable the broader FAST ecosystem:

• FAST Identity → Who is trusted
• FAST Security → How trust is enforced
• FAST Consent → What is permitted
• FAST Directory → Where trust is discovered

Together, these form a layered, reusable trust architecture aligned with modern interoperability demands.

This architecture allows trust to move from fragmented, one-off integrations to repeatable, scalable infrastructure.