HL7healthcare informatics trailblazer October 22, 2026 -- In attendance last night at a reunion dinner of my UCSF grad school cohort was our revered professor, Dr. Don Simborg. Decades ago, he created an essential element of the nascent field of healthcare informatics, the health information exchange protocol HL7. He invented it, and he gave it away: "...Donald W. Simborg put StatLAN into the public domain and pushed to create a neutral standards body to carry it forward. That act of generosity - choosing the commons over the moat - is the reason the rest of this story is possible. In 1989, when critics worried HL7 was too close to his own company, Simborg stepped down as chair... He gave away the one thing he could have owned. So the whole field could move." We walk among giants. |
Dan Keller's Nursing, Health Policy & Healthcare Technology Blog
Nursing Informatics · Clinical Perspectives · Healthcare Systems
"The United States alone [among wealthy countries] treats health care as a commodity to be distributed according to the ability to pay rather than a social service to be distributed according to medical need." — JAMA (2003), 290, 798