Carl Leitner is a Technical Officer at the World Health Organization in Geneva. He used to be the Technical Director of Digital Square at PATH and the Associate Director of Health Workforce Informatics at IntraHealth.
With over 20 years of experience in informatics, IT, software development, and education, Carl has spent more than 14 of those years adapting and designing health information systems for low- and middle-income countries.
He has worked closely with many global digital health tools and regularly collaborates with organizations that develop health informatics standards, even co-authoring several of them himself.
Welcome to Episode 24 of Exploring Healthcare Interoperability. Today we’re joined by Chuck Jaffe, CEO of Health Level Seven International (HL7), a key figure in advancing global healthcare standards.
Chuck shares insights into the current challenges and future opportunities for interoperability, the evolving role of the FHIR standard, and HL7’s strategic vision for healthcare innovation.
Join us to discover how global standards are shaping the future of patient care.
José Costa Teixeira , HL7 Belgium, Chair
Dr. Daniel Vreeman, HL7 International , Chief Standards Development Officer
Julia Skapik is the Chair of HL7 International and also the Chief Medical Information Officer for the National Association of Community Health Centers (NACHC) USA
Member, IHE International Board
Deputy Co-chair, IHE Europe
Executive Board, Global Consortium for eHealth Interoperability
Gemini Steering Committee
Co-chair, IHE Global Deployment Coordination Committee
Director for Terminology Management / Johns Hopkins University/ Biomedical Informatics & Data Science
HL7 Terminology Services Management Group (TSMG)/ HL7 Vulcan Accelerator Operations Committee
Vulcan FHIR-to-OMOP co-Lead / OHDSI OMOP + FHIR Working Group Lead / OHDSI CDM Vocabulary Working Group Liaison to HL7
Experienced executive with a demonstrated history of working in the health care industry. Skilled in government procurement, digital strategy, healthcare information technology (HIT), program development, change management and delivery. Strong business development professional with post graduate qualifications in Public Health from University of Sydney.
As one of the top 2% scientists in the world, Prof. Li is a pioneer of artificial intelligence in medicine and translational biomedical informatics. He has devoted himself to evolving the next generation of Al in patient safety and prevention ("Earlier Medicine"). He has also been deeply involved in international cooperation for biomedical informatics development in Asia, America, Europe, and Africa.
He is currently serving as President of the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) and previously served as Vice President of IMIA and President of the Asia-Pacific Association for Medical Informatics. Besides, he has been elected as a fellow of the Australia College of Health Informatics in 2009, the American College of Medical Informatics in 2010, and the International Academy of Health Science Informatics in 2017.
Ursula Hübner, Professor of Medical and Health Informatics and Quantitative Methods, Osnabrück University of Applied Sciences, Associate Dean for Digitalisation and Qualification of Young Scientists, IMIA Secretary and IAHSI Fellow
I am an HL7 member in Germany for twenty years and our research group is actively involved in the community
Dr. Huff is the Chief Medical Informatics Officer at Graphite Health, and a Professor (Clinical) of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Utah. He is board certified in Clinical Pathology.
He has worked in the area of medical vocabularies and medical database architecture for the past 30+ years. He is currently a fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics, a co-chair of the LOINC Committee, and a co-chair of the HL7 Clinical Information Modeling Initiative (CIMI). He is also the Chair of Logica (formerly the Healthcare Services Platform Consortium (HSPC)) and the Chair of the FHIR Foundation.
He is the former CMIO at Intermountain Healthcare, a former member of the ONC HIT Standards Committee and a former member of NCVHS. He is also a previous Chair (twice) of Health Level Seven (HL7). He teaches a course in medical vocabulary and data exchange standards in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Utah.
Paula Braun was the first Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She has been recognized as one of the top 50 Influencers in the Federal government on artificial intelligence and helped to launch the Helios FHIR Accelerator for public health. She is an internationally recognized expert on interoperability and innovation, and she collaborates with colleagues from across the government and private industry to use design thinking and advances in technology to help address real world health challenges.
Mrs. Davis is nationally known as a subject matter expert for healthcare standards, interoperability design and strategy for all healthcare stakeholders including consumers, hospitals, physician practices, public health, health information exchanges and vendors deploying health information technology to improve patient safety and quality of care. She is the recipient of the HIMSS 2022 Most Influential Women in Health IT award and the DirectTrust Interop Hero in 2021.She volunteers in several roles nationally and internationally.
She has served on the Tennessee HIMSS Board as the Health Information Exchange (HIE) liaison since 2010. She also serves on the IHE International Board of Directors since 2007 and within various committees and joint collaborations. She is the Executive Board Treasurer for the Global Consortium for eHealth Interoperability and is a member of the HL7/IHE Project Gemini Steering Committee who work together to advance interoperability and to accelerate the implementation of HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) to address high value use cases and exchange knowledge and information during the development of documentation and testing tools
Giorgio Cangioli is a Senior Consultant, HL7 Italy’s Vice Chair and Technical Lead. He is also a Board member of HL7 Europe, acts in the HL7 International Technical Steering Committee, and CDA Management Group member. He is also an HL7 Board member.
He is one of the contributors to the HL7 International Patient Summary (IPS) and FAIRness for FHIR projects ISO/TC 215 WG1, WG3 and WG6 member.
He was engaged for several years in EU funded Cross Border Health Services Projects.
Mario Hyland, Senior Vice President and Founder of AEGIS, has more than 30 years supporting Information Technology having a variety of roles and responsibilities. Mr. Hyland initially served the Pharmaceutical Industry in the capacity of Product Developer/Manager for a Call Reporting system with more than 120 Pharma companies across Canada and the U.S. Mr. Hyland was instrumental in coordinating and forming a Pharmaceutical (Walsh Marketing) industry collaboration and steering committee. Mr. Hyland served as a member of the Litton Systems Guidance Division, where he participated in Testing that served to address numerous Engineering Change Orders (ECO) associated with the performance and accuracy of the U.S. Cruise Missile System in U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) program. Mr. Hyland has taken this experience of driving better testing practices to a number of industry engagements with AEGIS. Mr. Hyland’s duties have included a broad range of Executive Leadership, Board and Advisory services, and Global Operations, including financial, budgeting, and marketing duties. Mr. Hyland has been a board member of industry organizations such as Application Service Providers (ASP) Executive Consortium, the HL7 ARB, and various HIMSS Chapters. Mr. Hyland’s focus on testing was spawned by a desire to ensure "PRODUCTION" systems have the highest data quality as possible. By leveraging this Test-First approach, Mr. Hyland has seen AEGIS engage with MCI/WorldCom (FTS2001 - 65,000 concurrent users), US Army AKO (Army Knowledge Online - 2M concurrent users), and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) My HealtheVet program.
Mr. Hyland’s introduction to Health IT standards first began with the VA, and HL7 V2 (MLLP) with VistA. With Dr. Kolodner’s (formerly VA Executive Director My HealtheVet) appointment to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), Mr. Hyland and AEGIS were engaged to support several IHE Profiles, and the NHIN (predecessor to eHEX) National Exchange. While working with the VA, DoD, ONC and other federal partners in support of VLER, Mr. Hyland advanced the concept of Standards based development to align with cloud testing services with the Developers Integration Lab (DIL). Through the DIL, more than 500 Organizations including vendors, implementers, and exchange participants were able to self-service and test conformance 24x7x365 to ensure continuous interoperability. Mr. Hyland led AEGIS efforts on the DIL and leveraged that program level experience to advance the Touchstone project, a cloud platform designed to support FHIR implementations around the globe. Touchstone is a Test-Driven-Development (TDD) environment which engages the community from the early stages of standards development, through early-adopters, and wide-industry adoption. Touchstone currently supports programs like Da Vinci, CARiN Alliance CARiN BB, Ontario Health, Nictiz, and Medcom (to name a few).
Mr. Hyland was recently recognized as a Federal Health IT Top 100 Executive for 2022, an award issued in collaboration with HHS, the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs. Mr. Hyland continues to speak about the benefits of standards based approaches to Interoperability, including leveraging HL7 Standards such as FHIR and numerous Implementation Guides (IG's).
Mr. Hyland’s desire to support the HL7 FHIR FAST Accelerators in the role of Steering Committee member will be to leverage his experience with the NHIN and other national exchange and information sharing networks to ensure FHIR continues to offer the community a reliable and robust "Continuously Interoperable" platform “At-Scale” for better Patient Care Coordination by accelerating adoption, reducing burden for implementers, and ensuring the highest level of standards compliance across the Integrated Ecosystem.
Michio Kimura is Professor and Director, Medical Informatics Dept. at Hamamtsu University, School of Medicine.
Dr. Kimura is a fellow of American College of Medical Informatics, and of HL7 international.
He is also a fellow of IAHSI / IMIA
Our guest for this episode is Steven Wanyee Macharia, HELINA
He is the President-Elect of the Pan African Health Informatics in Africa (HELINA); Founder Secretary General of the Kenya Health Informatics Association (KeHIA); Board Member of the OpenMRS Inc. Board of Directors, and Member of the OpenHIE Architecture Advisory Board;
Our guest for this episode is Kai Heitmann, HL7 Germany. Independent healthcare information technology consultant with more than 25 years of experience in the field of healthcare IT communication. Works mainly in Germany and the Netherlands but is also active in all of Europe.
Our guest for this episode is Fernando Campos, HL7 Argentina
Chair of HL7 Argentina since 2010 / Co-Chair of HL7 International Council
Fellow of HL7
Our guest for this episode is Ron Parker, from Canada
Chair of HL7 Canada since 2018
Co-Chair of the HL7 International Council
Fellow of HL7
37 years as an integrator and enterprise architect in health and social services
