Health Gorilla Chief Medical Officer Steven Lane, MD, MPH, was recognized with a Lifetime Leadership Award from The Sequoia Project this week – unexpected by him but no surprise given his record of championing interoperability for better patient care and outcomes.

“I am humbled,” he said. “It has truly been an honor to be a part of the community advancing the creation, exchange, and use of health data to improve health and healthcare.”

The Sequoia Project is the Recognized Coordinating Entity for the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA). Also at its annual meeting in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, Senior Vice President Dave Cassel represented Health Gorilla on a panel of other prospective Qualified Health Information Networks (QHINs). 

Dr. Lane joined Health Gorilla in the fall to help lead efforts to become one of the first designated QHINs.

“I am excited to be working with the team at Health Gorilla to support the implementation of TEFCA and bring our industry into the next generation of health data interoperability and utility,” Dr. Lane said. 

Most recently, Dr. Lane was the Clinical Informatics Director of Privacy, Information Security, and Interoperability at Sutter Health, where he has cared for patients as a primary care family physician for more than 30 years. 

In 2020, he was named as the Physician Executive Leader of the Year by the Health Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS) and the Association of Medical Directors of Information Systems (AMDIS).

Dr. Lane is currently chairman of the Carequality Steering Committee and a member of the Board of Directors of The Sequoia Project. He also serves as a member of the Health Information Technology Advisory Committee (HITAC) for the Department of Health and Human Services, the HIMSS Interoperability & HIE Committee, and the Da Vinci Project Clinical Advisory Council.

He was recently invited to serve on a subcommittee of the California Health and Human Services Agency (CalHHS) Center for Data Insights and Innovation to develop and implement the state's first-ever healthcare Data Exchange Framework (DxF).

Dr. Lane studied at University of California at Berkeley, earning his bachelor’s degree in Cognitive Science and Master of Public Health, and at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), where he earned his medical degree. He is a clinical professor of Family & Community Medicine at UCSF, board certified in Clinical Informatics, and a fellow of both the American Academy of Family Physicians and the American Medical Informatics Association.