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."

The HL7® Da Vinci Project is extending the deadline to nominate outstanding contributors for its 2025 Community Champions recognition program. Community members now have until Friday, February 6, 2026, to submit nominations, giving an extra week to spotlight colleagues and collaborators who are making a real impact on healthcare interoperability.

The Community Champions program honors individuals from across the Da Vinci Project's diverse, multi-stakeholder ecosystem, including health plans, provider organizations, accountable care organizations (ACOs), and health IT vendors. As an HL7® FHIR® Accelerator, the Da Vinci Project brings together public and private sector leaders to advance standards that support automated workflows, real-time data exchange, reduced administrative burden and improved care coordination.

Since launching in 2020, the Community Champions program has recognized individuals who embody a spirit of “industry above self.” Champions are known for their collaboration, leadership, and commitment to advancing real-world adoption of HL7 FHIR standards in support of value-based care and a more connected healthcare system.

The HL7 Da Vinci Project recently named eight healthcare technology experts as its 2021 Da Vinci Community Champions. The individuals recognized for this prestigious honor represent the diverse membership of the HL7^® Da Vinci Project, a collaborative multi-stakeholder effort including health plans, hospital systems, accountable care organizations (ACOs) and technology vendors. The awards were announced on July 20, 2022, at the monthly HL7 Da Vinci Project member meeting. This is the second year in which the HL7^® Da Vinci Project has recognized innovative leaders in health IT who are helping to guide the evolution of the HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR^®) standard.

As a designated HL7 FHIR accelerator program, the Da Vinci Project is a private sector consortium dedicated to improving the healthcare delivery system by accelerating interoperability standards to support value-based care, reduce administrative burden, automate workflow and improve provider teams’ ability to impact health outcomes.

Last year, the Da Vinci Project leadership created the Community Champions Program to recognize and celebrate the talented problem solvers advancing interoperability within the industry. The Community Champion Program puts a spotlight on individuals who display the unique traits of “industry above self, a passion for making the healthcare system work better, supporting others, and promoting change.”

Program Showcases Individuals Making Significant Contributions to Advancing Implementation Guide Use

Initiatives such as the Da Vinci Project make strides toward interoperability as organizations adopt the vision and push it forward to reality

To achieve the progress the HL7 Da Vinci Project has made to date, it relies on the extraordinary efforts of individuals who consistently work to advance the organization’s goals. This might entail stepping forward to lead a work group of peers, spending extra hours editing and reviewing work in progress workflows, recruiting business partners to test early versions as early adopters, or scouring their organization to find the right subject matter expert for a particular business challenge or question, all to ensure that early HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®) implementation guides work.

These team members exemplify the spirit and intent of our collaborative industry-first Da Vinci efforts, said Jocelyn Keegan, program manager for the Da Vinci Project. “The work of Da Vinci is, at its core, a human powered effort,” she noted. “It is imperative that we publicly acknowledge the contributions of the smart, dedicated thought leaders who are redefining how payers and providers collaborate.”

To recognize individuals who are taking a lead role in working to make the outputs of Da Vinci real, the project has named six leaders as the initial class of the Da Vinci Community Champion program for their contributions in 2020.

With the ascent of value-based care, interoperability is expected to evolve at an even faster pace to meet the business demands that new reimbursement incentives are producing.

Monthly Event is Scheduled for 4:00 to 5:30 p.m. ET on Wednesday, March 24, 2021

Advancing the use of HL7’s Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®) takes both strong proponents advocating for the cause and pioneering organizations that lead the industry by putting concepts into practice.

Both aspects important to FHIR adoption will be on display at the March Community Roundtable of the Da Vinci Project, scheduled for Wednesday, March 24, from 4 to 5:30 p.m. ET. The roundtable has become a staple of the Da Vinci Project’s efforts to highlight successful deployments of its implementation guides, intended to help healthcare organizations manage value-based care initiatives.

MiHIN Shares Lessons Learned with Plan-Net

An example of a real-world implementation will be provided by the Michigan Health Information Network (MiHIN). A team from the organization will share lessons learned from its deployment of Plan-Net, the Payer Data Exchange (PDex)-Plan Network Directory Implementation Guide that focuses on Payer-Provider Directories. FHIR offers the potential to automate this typically manually intensive process for all parties, and MiHIN will describe its journey to putting the implementation guide into place to achieve this.