It's become a tradition that every HL7 Working Group Plenary meeting I give out one of my Ad Hoc Harley awards. This is HL7's fourtieth year, and the working group is celebrating one of its members who has provided leadership throughout those 40 years of the organization's existence, Ed Hammond. Two other traditions prevent me from celebrating Ed in this post however. First, I've already named him, and second, Ed and Wes Rishel were already recipients 9 years ago. I cannot anoint him a Lord more than once, I'd have to come up with a whole new category.
But there is another deserving individual with whom I've worked for many years. This man is magical. He's a business development leader I expect by nature rather than nurture. What's remarkable though is that he's not a developer at all, yet he can rapidly see the possibilities behind an implementation guide faster than I can. He can also build a slide deck in power point with complex builds faster than Charles Parisot. His gravity well is not quite as steep as Charles's, but he will similarly suck you in to whatever his current project is. I can only say that I have managed to suck him into one of mine successfully once and very recently, by making him think it was his own idea, much to my delight.
What I know about how he got his start was as a leader of GE Healthcare's clearinghouse business, which came originally from the IDX acquisition back in early 2006. Not too long after I joined, he then headed up GEHC's Health Information Exchange business. This was one of the few growth opportunities to come from within. We (because I was a frequent technology and architectural contributor) quickly built out that business based on adoption of the IHE XD* family of profiles. That business was eventually spun off into a JV with Microsoft and he went with it, but we were still in frequent communication. Then he left to go join a consulting firm Audacious Inquiry, along with others of his former colleagues and customers over time. One of those former colleagues alerted him that I was "open for work" at the time, and he had me on the phone the next day, and in an interview the next week, which is how I wound up working under him in my first year there.
Like many members of the Lords and Ladies of the Ad Hoc Harley, he retired from Health IT, only then to lay out his own shingle. He found himself on the board of the eHealth Exchange, and then again, back into Business Development. And, like many others (save Ed who may never retire), he has finally retired again, although my prediction is that we'll still keep hearing from him, and in fact, he may emerge from time to time on some next new project. I look forward to seeing what he does in his future.
So, now for the reveal. Today, I am inducting Bill Howard into the Lords and Ladies of the Ad Hoc Harley. While it's not true that the HIE world wouldn't have existed without Bill, it is true that HIE and TEFCA wouldn't be what they are today without his efforts.
