HL7 Leadership
Julia Skapik MD, MPH
Julia Skapik, MD, PhD, serves as the HL7 International Board of Directors Chair. She is a board-certified Internist and Clinical Informaticist. Most recently, she was the Medical Director for Informatics at the National Association of Community Health Centers (NACHC). Dr. Skapik has also worked as a physician within the Inova Health System and was the Chief Health Information Officer for Cognitive Medical Systems, Inc. Dr. Skapik previously served five years as a Senior Medical Informatics Officer at the Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy (formerly known as the Office of the National Coordinator) in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. In this position, she led efforts to improve quality standards and participated in the development of international standards.
Dr. Skapik is a recognized leader in health IT interoperability, governance, and clinical content. She graduated from the New College of Florida and received her Master of Public Health in Epidemiology and Biostatistics and medical degree from Johns Hopkins University.
Caroline Macumber
Carol Macumber currently services as HL7 International’s Board of Directors Chair-Elect. She is an Executive Vice President leading Client Services at Clinical Architecture. Carol is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP) with a master’s degree in biomedical engineering. Carol has over twenty years of experience leading IT and consulting projects for organizations, including Canada Health Infoway, eHealth Ontario, The National Committee for Quality Assurance, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and many other federal and commercial clients. She was previously the Vice President of Technology and Operations at Apelon, Inc., a leading terminology asset management services company. Carol gained experience and knowledge of large system implementations via her role as a Senior Business Consultant at MetLife, where she led enterprise-level technology enhancement engagements for Actuarial, Claims and Billing domains within MetLife’s long-term care product line.
Carol is a co-chair of both the HL7 Terminology Services Management Group and the HL7 Terminology Infrastructure Work Group. She is also an elected member of the International Health Terminology Standards Development Organization (IHTSDO) Technical Committee, a Fellow of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), and serves on the advisory committee for OpenHIE’s terminology services.
Charles Jaffe MD, PhD, FHL7
As the Chief Executive Officer of HL7, Dr. Jaffe serves as the organization’s global ambassador, fostering relationships with key industry stakeholders. A 37-year veteran of the healthcare IT industry, Dr. Jaffe was previously the Senior Global Strategist for the Digital Health Group at Intel Corporation, Vice President of Life Sciences at SAIC, and the Director of Medical Informatics at AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals. He completed his medical training at Johns Hopkins and Duke Universities, and was a post-doctoral fellow at the National Institutes of Health and at Georgetown University. Formerly, he was President of InforMed, an informatics consultancy for research informatics. Over the course of his career, he has been the principal investigator for more than 200 clinical trials, and has served in various leadership roles in the American Medical Informatics Association. He has been a board member on leading organizations for information technology standards, and served as the chair of a national institutional review board. Most recently, he held an appointment in the Department of Engineering at Penn State University. Currently, Dr. Jaffe is the Visiting Scholar at the University of California San Diego Department of Biomedical Informatics. Dr. Jaffe has been the contributing editor for several journals and has published on a range of subjects, including clinical management, informatics deployment, and healthcare policy.
Daniel Vreeman DPT, FHL7
Daniel J. Vreeman serves as the Chief Standards Development Officer and Chief AI Officer for HL7. Dr. Vreeman is a physical therapist, biomedical informatician, and expert in health data standards. His work aims to create a global health ecosystem where data is available with open standards that unlock the potential for information systems and applications to improve health decision-making and care. Dr. Vreeman has developed internationally adopted health data standards, implemented them in multi-institutional health IT systems, evaluated their use, and provided strategic advice to interoperability initiatives of numerous U.S. federal agencies and national eHealth efforts in other countries.
Dr. Vreeman previously served as Senior Clinical Data Standards Lead at RTI International where he led the development and evaluation of interoperability projects. From 2006 to 2019, Dr. Vreeman was the Director of LOINC and Health Data Standards with the Regenstrief Institute, Inc. and the inaugural Regenstrief McDonald Scholar in Data Standards at the Indiana University School of Medicine. In those roles, he led the development of LOINC, an open vocabulary standard for health measurements, observations and documents that is now used in more than 185 countries.
Dr. Vreeman has served as principal investigator on 30 externally funded projects totaling approximately $23 million. He has led productive collaborations with international organizations, federal agencies, academic institutions, professional associations, and industry leaders. Dr. Vreeman is a skilled communicator who has written 40 scientific papers, a book, 2 book chapters, numerous technical documents, and has delivered over 275 presentations worldwide on health data standards, interoperability, and health informatics topics.
Karen Van Hentenryck
Karen Van Hentenryck, MA, MBA, serves as the Executive Administrative Director for Health Level Seven International (HL7). A key leadership team member and an active participant in strategic decisions affecting HL7, Karen oversees the administrative functions of the organization, ensuring seamless operations and effective collaboration across departments. She contributes to the development and implementation of organizational strategies, policies, and practices, and assists the CEO in strategic planning and execution, including leading special projects and initiatives that support organizational goals.
Prior to her current role, Karen served as the Associate Executive Director at HL7 for 25 years, and as the Director of Technical Publications at HL7 for an additional two years. In addition, she has worked at various HIT vendors and payers as a technical writer and marketing professional. She holds a BA and MA in English and an MBA in non-profit management.
Diego Kaminker FHL7
Diego Kaminker, FHL7, currently serves as the Deputy Chief Standards Implementation Officer at HL7 International. Diego Kaminker is a globally recognized interoperability expert and implementer in the field of healthcare information technology. He is the founder and owner of Kern IT with specialties in integration, software development and project management. Kaminker has been a member of the HL7 community for twenty years and has served multiple terms as the chair of HL7 Argentina as well as an affiliate director of the HL7 International board of directors. He has defined, implemented and maintained hundreds of HL7 interoperability projects throughout the course of his career. As a prominent HL7 educator, he has led hundreds of training courses and created the self-paced online HL7 Fundamentals Course, which has attracted over 6,000 students worldwide. He is also a founding member of HL7 Argentina and the HL7 FHIR Foundation and has participated in the Argentina National Digital Health Network and has served as a guest faculty member at Columbia University in the United States.
Viet Nguyen MD
Viet Nguyen, M.D., is the Chief Standards Implementation Officer at HL7 International, where he leads the standards implementation division alongside Deputy Chief Standards Implementation Officer, Diego Kaminker.
Dr. Nguyen is an internist, pediatrician and clinical informaticist with a history of leadership roles such as chief medical officer and chief medical information officer at Leidos Corporation, Lockheed-Martin and Systems Made Simple. He served as the chief pediatric resident at University of Cincinnati and Cincinnati Children’s and completed an informatics fellowship at the University of Utah. He is also the founder of Stratametrics, LLC, an informatics consulting firm serving numerous commercial and federal clients. Dr. Nguyen has been active in HL7 for more than 20 years and has nearly two decades of experience in health information technology focused on interoperability standards and product development. He has provided consulting services to government and commercial organizations in developing interoperable workflows and technologies. In addition, Dr. Nguyen is a nationally recognized FHIR educator and has served as the Technical Director for the HL7 FHIR Accelerator, the Da Vinci Project, a private sector initiative comprised of industry leaders and health information technology technical experts who are working together to accelerate the adoption of HL7® FHIR® as the standard to support and integrate value-based care (VBC) data exchange across communities.