Winter 2026 Update from HQ

In this edition, I will be reviewing the meetings and accomplishments from the second half of 2024.

FHIR Connectathons

HL7 hosted two Connectathons in the second half of the year, the summer CMS Connectathon and the September Connectathon, which convened in Pittsburgh as a precursor to the Annual Plenary and Working Group meeting.

CMS Connectathon

HL7 hosted the sixth annual CMS connectathon July 15-17. This virtual event featured 13 tracks representing FHIR implementation guides that support CMS policies. The agenda for day one mainly consisted of government policy updates in the morning, followed by FHIR education and Da Vinci implementation guide and project updates in the afternoon. The second day consisted of education and testing, with day three comprising readouts of each track to share progress. There were 1483 attendees, with 531 unique logins for the day one policy updates alone. Recordings and slides are available on the HL7 website here. 

Pittsburgh Connectathon

As is typical, HL7 hosted a connectathon September 13-14 in Pittsburgh, just before its 39^th Annual Plenary and Working Group Meeting. The Connectathon offered twenty-nine tracks, attended by 283 participants. Eighty-four percent of attendees were from the US, and 16% were non-US-based. A complete list of tracks and other information about this most recent connectathon can be found here.

HL7’s 39^th Plenary and WGM Event

HL7’s Plenary Meeting

HL7 celebrated its 39^th Plenary meeting in Pittsburgh, PA, on Monday, September 15. This year’s plenary theme was Innovation in Healthcare AI, and we were blessed to be in a location with several industry AI experts. We reached out to AI experts at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University, and both were gracious enough to send multiple speakers. The presentations were inspiring and well-received. The complete list of speakers at this year’s 39^th Annual Plenary Meeting is provided in the table below, along with slides (if available) and recordings.

Session 1 included the following speakers:

Speaker	Presentation Title
Charles Jaffe, MD, PhD CEO, HL7 International	Welcome and Opening Comments
Tom Keane, MD, MBA ASTP; Assistance Secretary for Technology Policy, National Coordinator for Health Information Technology	Updates from ASTP
Michael R. Pinsky, MD, CM, Dr hc, FCCP, MCCM, FAPS Professor Critical Care Medicine, Bioengineering, Cardiovascular Disease and Anesthesiology University of Pittsburgh	Moving to Personalized Medicine by using AI to Redefine Health and Disease
John Zimmerman, MDes Tang Family Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Human-Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon University	AI in Healthcare: Digging in the Wrong Spots
Ahmad Tafti, PhD Assistant Professor, Health Informatics & Director of University of Pittsburgh’s HexAI Lab	Uncertainty Quantification and Explainable AI in Medical Imaging: A Timely Call to Action
Anantha Shekhar, MD, PhD Senior Vice Chancellor for Health SciencesDean UPMC School of Medicine	Academic Medicine: AI Innovation to Solve Healthcare’s Toughest Problems

Session 2 included the following speakers:

Speaker	Presentation Title
Rema Padman, PhD Trustees Professor of Management Science and Healthcare Informatics, Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University, and Adjunct Professor, Department of Biomedical Informatics, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine	AI-Driven Digital Therapeutics for Health Literacy
Justin Chan, PhD Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University	AI-Powered Mobile Health Innovations
Hooman Rashidi, MD, MS, FCAP Associate Dean of AI in Medicine, Professor & Endowed Chair of Lombardi-Shinozuka Experimental Pathology Research, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Executive Vice Chair of Computational Pathology and Informatics Division, UPMC	The Transformative Role of Auto-MLs, Synthetic Data and Generative AI in Medicine
Daniel Vreeman, Chief AI Officer, HL7 International

First Ever Hybrid Working Group Meeting

The regular Working Group Meeting convened Monday afternoon through Friday and included our first-ever hybrid offering. The decision to offer a hybrid option at the September WGM was made after securing input from our members and, in response to the fact that many government employees were unable to travel and several others whose employers were no longer supporting travel. Producing a completely hybrid meeting requires significant staff resources, so we decided instead to offer hybrid participation during the general sessions each day, for two WG sessions each quarter, and for all educational sessions. Work groups were not required to participate in the hybrid offerings. Instead, we invited interested work groups to sign up for one of the two hybrid-enabled rooms available each quarter, and we prioritized the meetings we felt, from experience, would attract the most attendees. In the end, 371 individuals attended the Working Group Meeting in person, while 47 attended remotely. Many thanks to our meeting staff, Mary Ann Boyle and Kirsten Trower, for organizing not only the in-person event but also the remote participation.

Annual Business Meeting, Awards and Recognitions

As is typical, we convened the Annual Business Meeting on Wednesday morning during the general session. Our chair, Julia Skapik, MD, and Treasurer, John Hatem, provided a “state of the union address”. The Annual Business Meeting concluded with our Secretary, Yan Heras, announcing the results of the 2025 leadership elections:

Results of Leadership Elections

The following members were elected to the HL7 Board of Directors for the 2026-2027 term:

The following member was elected as the HL7 International Council Co-Chair for the 2026-2027 term:

The following members were elected to the HL7 Technical Steering Committee for the 2026-2027 term:

Wednesday morning is also the time when HL7 recognizes several individuals. We begin this portion of our meeting with a few moments of silence for our colleagues who have passed during the year. This year, we observed a moment of silence for colleagues, Atul Butte, MD. PhD, and Florica Moldaveanu (insert pics here).

Following the moment of silence, we recognized the newly elected class of John Quinn Fellows, the recipients of the W. Edward Hammond Volunteer of the Year Award, and the winners of the first Annual AI Challenge Awards. Each of these is described in more detail below.

The 2025 Class of John Quinn HL7 Fellows

Established in 2010, this award recognizes HL7 members with at least 15 years of active membership and outstanding service, commitment, and contributions to HL7. The award honors the memory of an 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 2025 recipients of the John Quinn HL7 Fellowship Award include:

• Keith Boone
• Giorgio Cangioli
• Floyd Eisenberg, MD
• Alexander Henket
• Juha Mykkänen, PhD
• Lisa Nelson
• Frank Ploeg
• Line Saele

Ed Hammond Volunteer of the Year Award recipients

HL7 honored three members with the 27th 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 2025 recipients include:

• Jeff Brown, Lantana
• Gay Dolin,
• Linda Michaelsen

See the in-depth article on their contributions in this issue.

AI Challenge Award Recipients

From life-saving applications to cutting-edge research, the HL7 AI Challenge is a platform for visionaries, developers, and problem-solvers worldwide to showcase how HL7 is driving real-world solutions in the health sector.

This year’s AI Challenge Award Recipients include:

• Saquib Ahmad
• Dr. Kevin Baskin
• Gabe Colburn
• Ryan Doherty
• Shailesh Dudala
• Karim Keshavjee
• Bilal Ghumman
• Robert Lario, PhD
• William Laolagi
• Dr. Jonathan Marcus
• Amir Moghimi
• Julianne Newman
• Diane Nguyen
• Olim Saidov
• Trisotech
• Vento Health

Long Time Affiliates

We also recognized several affiliates during the Wednesday general session who have been members for 20 years or longer. These affiliates have strengthened the fabric of our organization for many years and include:

• HL7 Brazil
• HL7 Canada
• HL7 Croatia
• HL7 Finland
• HL7 Germany
• HL7 India
• HL7 Japan
• HL7 Korea
• HL7 Netherlands
• HL7 Spain
• HL7 Switzerland
• HL7 Taiwan

Staff Changes

Stay tuned for updates from headquarters about the individuals who will be assuming these two roles, and please, make sure you congratulate them and assist in any way you can.

Other Notable Achievements

·   Staff member Laura Mitter passed the Salesforce admin test – Currently, only two staff members, Laura and Josh Procious, are certified Salesforce Admins. Congratulations to Laura, who now provides Salesforce support to the membership and marketing teams.

·   New format for our newsletter – Andrea Ribick, Pat Guerra and Laura Mitter also collaborated last year to give a fresh new look to our Annual Report. If you are reading this newsletter, you have noticed that it, too, has a fresh look.

·   HL7 FHIR R6 went to ballot – The ballot opened Dec 19, 2025, and closed January 19. Comments will be reviewed and discussed at the virtual January 2026 Working Group Meeting. Many thanks to Lynn Laakso and Anne Wizauer for the countless hours they spend each month to ensure our ballot projects and documents move in the right direction while adhering to HL7 and ANSI processes.

·   Started building a culture of continuous process improvement – This year, all staff goals included documenting their processes. Getting processes written down in an established format is a first step toward building a culture of process improvement. In addition to documenting process, all staff participated in a 10-week improvement process training course during which we improved three processes. Staff are now enabled and challenged to apply the principles they learned and improve other processes to improve overall efficiency. We have even established a site where our community can submit process improvement suggestions. Be warned: if you suggest a process improvement, be ready to work with us to identify and implement the improvement! Submit your suggestions for process improvements here.

·   Updated and re-designed our About HL7 Page – If you are just discovering HL7, this is the place you will look first to learn about us. Many thanks to our marcom team of Andrea Ribick, Pat Guerra, Laura Mitter and Melinda Stewart for updating the About page.

·   Completed the first milestone in our website re-design project – Undertaking a website redesign can be a daunting project. Still, we started that project this year and completed milestone one, which was divided into two parts: (1) Discovery & Research and (2) Requirements & Planning. Many thanks to Eric for laying out the project at the start and participating along the way. Our marcom team conducted discovery and research. They included a competitive analysis, the collection of analytics (thanks to Mel), conducting several focus groups, and a member survey to understand what our community likes, dislikes, and wants from our website. Mel Stewart led requirements and planning discussions, which included participation from many staffers, including Chad Neal, Mary Ann Boyle, Michelle Hill, Linda Jenkins, and me. Laura Mitter will lead the design phase in Q1 of 2026, followed by development, which Chad Neale will lead. Given other priorities and projects, we anticipate a public launch of the new website in Q1 of 2027.

·   New and renewing members and first-ever every Giving Tuesday membership drive – As of this writing (Nov 20, 2025), we’ve welcomed 35 new members in 2025 and have a very healthy renewal rate of 79% (hoping to have more than 40 new members and a renewal rate exceeding 80% by year’s end).  Many thanks to Linda Jenkins, our membership director, and our marketing team for their work in attracting new members and retaining current members. We are launching our first-ever Giving Tuesday campaign this year, thanks to Linda Jenkins’ idea to center it on membership. The best way that people and organizations can give to HL7 in 2025 is to join HL7, renew their membership, or upgrade their membership.

·   ASK the ELT Anything – The ASK the ELT Anything was a new program this year, launched by our marcom team. It is open only to members and allows them to speak with the ELT, share ideas, and ask any burning questions. It is an interesting and enjoyable program, and we look forward to continuing it in 2026. Thanks again to the Marcom team for implementing this new program.

Thanks for the Memories

As I retire after 30 years with HL7, I want to thank our incredible staff, members, and leaders who made this journey unforgettable. Your passion and dedication have shaped HL7 into what it is today. It has been an honor to serve this community.