Electronic Health Reporter

Health Level Seven (HL7) International, the global authority on interoperability of health information technology with members in 55 countries, announced the 2023 class of John Quinn HL7 Fellows and the 2023 recipients of the W. Edward Hammond, Ph.D. Volunteer of the Year Awards during its annual business meeting at the 37th Annual Plenary and Working Group Meeting in Phoenix.

2023 HL7 Fellows

The John Quinn HL7 Fellowship Award was presented to seven individuals during HL7’s 37^th Annual Plenary and Working Group Meeting. The award was established to recognize HL7 members with at least 15 years of active membership as well as outstanding service, commitment and contributions to HL7. The award is named in memory of HL7 founding member John Quinn, who served as the organization’s second board chair, the long-time chair of the Technical Steering Committee and the first chief technology officer. The 2023 recipients of the John Quinn HL7 Fellowship Award include:

• Adam Chee, chair, HL7 Singapore
• Carmela Couderc, branch chief, Office of Technology, Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC)
• Suzanne Gonzales-Webb
• Charles Jaffe, M.D., Ph.D., chief executive officer, HL7 International
• Joginder Madra, information technology and management consultant, JOJ Group, Inc.
• Mitra Rocca, associate director, Medical Informatics, Food and Drug Administration
• Dan Vreeman, D.P.T., chief standards development officer

HL7 Volunteers of the Year

HL7 honored three members with the 26^th annual W. Edward Hammond, Ph.D. Volunteer of the Year Award. Established in 1997, the award is named after Dr. Ed Hammond, one of HL7’s most active volunteers and a founding member as well as past board chair. The award recognizes individuals who have made significant contributions to HL7’s success. The 2023 recipients include:

• Robert Hausam, M.D., FHL7, consultant and owner, Hausam Consulting LLC
• Mark Janczewski, M.D., M.P.H., FAAFP, FAMIA, president and chief executive officer, Medical Networks, LLC
• Robert McClure, M.D., FHL7, president, MD Partners, Inc.
• Lisa Nelson, senior vice president, Enterprise Integrations, ADVault, Inc.

About the Volunteers:

Robert Hausam, M.D., FHL7, has been an active member of HL7 for 22 years and has served as the co-chair of both the Terminology Infrastructure and Orders and Observations Work Groups. He is a primary leader of the International Patient Summary (IPS) project and is a principal editor for the IPS HL7 Fast Health Interoperability Resources (FHIR^®) and Clinical Document Architecture (CDA^®) implementation guides (IGs).

Over the years, Dr. Hausam has worked extensively with the HL7 Version 2 and CDA standards and is now active in the FHIR community where he serves as a co-editor for the HL7 FHIR specification and several FHIR IGs. He also assists in the maintenance of the terminology services for the HL7 FHIR specification and IG build environment. Dr. Hausam has volunteered as the IPS and Terminology Services Track Lead at numerous FHIR connectathons, and regularly offers his terminological and clinical expertise as a physician to the FHIR community on the Zulip chat site. In addition, he serves as HL7’s representative on the SNOMED on FHIR Group and as one of the HL7 representatives to ISO TC215.

Mark Janczewski, M.D., M.P.H., FAAFP, FAMIA, joined HL7 in 2009 and has served as a co-chair for the Electronic Health Records (EHR) work group since 2013. He has been a long-standing and consistent champion for health IT and standards development to improve interoperability of health IT systems from a variety of aspects, particularly from the view of the clinician.

Dr. Janczewski’s interests are in the areas of health IT system adoption and implementation, functional requirements development, workflow and decision modeling, HL7 FHIR implementation, metrics and analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI). He is one of the co-authors of the EHR-S Functional Model Release 2, the Personal Health Record System (PHR-S) FM R.2, Data Elements for Emergency Department Systems (DEEDS), and has participated in the development of and/or co-authored several functional profile standards. In addition, Dr. Janczewski is currently facilitating the AI Focus Team’s Project 11 on AI Data Lifecycle, the first-ever AI-based standards development effort in HL7.

Robert McClure, M.D., FHL7, has been active in HL7 for over two decades. He has played an integral role in establishing and participating in the Terminology Services Management Group, serving as liaison to the TSC and enabling many projects in 2022-2023. McClure regularly contributes improvements to the HL7 FHIR publication of HL7 Terminology (THO) and the Unified Terminology Governance (UTG) process for terminology maintenance, ensuring that the policies and tooling surrounding its maintenance supports implementer needs and timelines. As a long-time Terminology Infrastructure Work Group co-chair, he has significantly contributed to HL7 specifications and terminology guidance including “Characteristics of a Value Set Definition” and the gender harmony specifications. In addition, McClure is also the terminology representative on the HL7 US Realm Steering Committee and serves as terminology facilitator for the Structured Documents, Clinical Quality Information, and Clinical Decision Support Work Groups

McClure’s current efforts include leadership of the Gender Harmony Cross-Paradigm Implementation Guide, along with the individual product family IG updates to reflect the gender harmony model. This work will directly make it possible for health care organizations to provide more efficient and accurate gender-affirming care.

Lisa Nelson has been a member of HL7 for 12 years and is an active member of the Structured Documents and Patient Care Work Groups. She has served as a co-chair of the CDA Management Group for the past six years where she has acted as a product manager, documenting the portfolio of the products and creating a process to maintain the information. In addition, Nelson is the author of multiple HL7 CDA implementation guides.

Nelson is passionate about improving patient experience, engaging patients and empowering patients and caregivers. She has focused on advance care planning (ACP) documents, serving as a lead editor on both the CDA and HL7 implementation guides for personal ACP document healthcare data content standards.

Finally, she has also provided valuable testing of the EHR FHIR servers and contributions to FHIR representing the small app vendor perspective.