About Me

Biography

Dr. Daniel 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 is the Chief Standards Development Officer at HL7 International where he leads the development of standards like FHIR® that are advancing health data interoperability and enabling new digital freedoms around the world​. He also serves as Chair of the HL7 FHIR Foundation Board of Directors.

Dr. Vreeman is an interoperability expert who 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 several other countries. He previously served as the Senior Clinical Data Standards Lead at RTI International. From 2006 to 2019, Dr. Vreeman was the Director, 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’s leadership on health data standards is globally recognized. He has published numerous scientific papers, guides and articles, and has presented over 275 invited lectures worldwide. He is the author of the book LOINC Essentials: A step-by-step guide for getting your local codes mapped to LOINC. His innovative work has been recognized through notable awards, including being elected as fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics, fellow of the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics, and a John Quinn HL7 Fellow.  He has received the Distinguished Alumni Award from the Duke University Doctor of Physical Therapy Program, the Technology and Innovation Award from the American Physical Therapy Association Health Policy and Administration Section, and the LOINC Award for Distinguished Contributions from the Regenstrief Institute. He has also been recognized with an honorary LOINC code 101000-8 for his lasting legacy as a perennial advocate of health data standards.

Dr. Vreeman earned a Bachelor of Arts in Biological Sciences from Cornell University, and a Doctor of Physical Therapy (DPT) from Duke University. He also completed a two year NLM-sponsored Medical Informatics Research Fellowship at the Regenstrief Institute, Inc, which is associated with the Indiana University School of Medicine. While an informatics fellow, he earned a MS in Clinical Research with an emphasis on medical informatics, through the NIH-funded Clinical Investigator Training Enhancement (CITE) program.

Throughout his career Dr. Vreeman has taught biomedical informatics in academic settings and many other forums. Early in his career at Indiana University he taught P645 Evidence-based Critical Inquiry II and co-instructed P513 – Functional Anatomy and Clinical Biomechanics. He has worked as a generalist physical therapist on the inpatient wards at two level I trauma center hospitals in Indianapolis.

Honors and Awards

In 2023, Dr. Vreeman was elected to the 2023 fellowship class of the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics (IAHSI). The IAHSI, which is the honor society for the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA), recognizes expertise in biomedical and health informatics internationally. The fellowship is one of the highest honors in the field and recognizes substantial achievements in health and biomedical informatics. Dr. Vreeman was also elected as an HL7 John Quinn Fellow in 2023. This award recognize outstanding commitment and sustained contribution to Health Level Seven International, the global authority on interoperability of health information technology with members in 55 countries.

In 2022, Dr. Vreeman was given the LOINC Award for Distinguished Contributions from the Regenstrief Institute.  This award honors an individual who has made sustained and enduring contributions that advance health data interoperability with LOINC. He was also bestowed an honorary LOINC code 101000-8 for his lasting legacy as a perennial advocate of health data standards.

In 2018, Dr. Vreeman was given the inaugural Technology and Innovation Award from the American Physical Therapy Association’s section HPA The Catalyst. In 2017, he was elected as a fellow to the American College of Medical Informatics, which is the honorary college of elected informatics fellows from around the world who have made significant and sustained contributions to the field of medical informatics and who have met rigorous scholarly scrutiny by their peers. In 2017 he was also awarded the Distinguished Alumni Award from Duke University Physical Therapy Alumni Association. The Indianapolis Business Journal selected him for the 2015 Forty Under 40 list.

For three consecutive years, his manuscripts were selected as a finalist for the Distinguished Paper Award, an award that highlights the most notable and distinguished papers accepted to the AMIA Annual Symposium. His AMIA 2007 paper ‘A Rationale for Parsimonious Laboratory Term Mapping by Frequency’ won that award. He has also been selected as a Distinguished Paper Reviewer in 2013 and 2014. He was senior author on a paper about the urgent need for competencies in biomedical informatics within physical therapy education that was published in the Journal of Physical Therapy Education. This paper earned the 2010 Stanford Award from the Education Section of the American Physical Therapy Association (APTA), given to the paper with the most influential ideas for physical therapist education.

Professional Societies

Dr. Vreeman is a long-time member of the American Physical Therapy Association where he is active in the Sections of Health Policy and Administration, Education, and Research. From 2007 to 2013 he served as the President of the Technology Special Interest Group of the APTA HPA section. He is also a member of the American Medical Informatics Association and the American College of Medical Informatics. He has been a long-time voting member of the Health Level Seven standards development organization, and was a founding member of the HL7® FHIR® Foundation where he now presently serves as Chair.

Business Adventures

Blue Sky Premise, LLC is the company he and his wife (the more lovely Dr. Vreeman) co-founded to support our commercial activities in health and healthcare IT. Blue Sky Premise is the publisher of the LOINC Essentials eBook.

Personal Interests

Outside of work Dr. Vreeman enjoys many other diverse activities. He is a creative at the core. He is passionate about design, music, and technology. When he’s not traveling, he loves playing bass guitar and getting exercise on the basketball court. He is exploring photography, especially capturing special moments with his boys. Even with all these interests, his favorite activity is spending time with his wife Lorrie (also a physical therapist) and three young boys.