After 38 years of leading Vermont Oxford Network (VON), co-founders Jeffrey Horbar, MD, and Roger Soll, MD, will retire and transition to the role of senior advisors as of July 1.

Drs. Horbar and Soll cofounded Vermont Oxford Network with Dr. Jerold F. Lucy in 1988. To honor Dr. Lucey’s important contributions to neonatology, in 2007 Vermont Oxford Network and the Department of Pediatrics Larner College of Medicine endowed the Jerold F. Lucey Chair in Neonatal Medicine at the University of Vermont. Dr. Horbar was the inaugural holder of this Chair.

Dr. Horbar will step down as Chief Executive Officer and President, having previously also held the title of Chief Scientific Officer. Dr. Soll will retire as Vice President and Director of the Institute for Evidence-Based Practice.

Danielle Ehret, MD, MPH, who has served as the Director of Global Health and Chief Medical Officer will step into the role of Chief Executive Officer and President and assume the Jerold F. Lucey Chair in Neonatal Medicine at University of Vermont. Erika Edwards, PhD, MPH will serve as Chief Scientific Officer and Vice President. The VON leadership team will also welcome John Zupancic, MD, MS, ScD as Chief Impact Officer, and Alex Stevenson, MD, as the Director of Global Health.

Under the visionary leadership of Dr. Horbar and Dr. Soll, VON grew from 34 centers in the U.S. to more than 1,200 centers in 42 countries. What started as an organization focused on clinical trials and collecting benchmarking data on the care of very low birth weight infants has grown with the vision to improve the lives of every newborn and family worldwide. VON now provides the largest and most comprehensive databases for neonatal practices and outcomes in the world.

“It’s exciting to see members from high-, middle-, and low-income countries learning together with a common goal. Despite the dramatically different contexts in these different countries, our goals are the same and we can learn important lessons from one another,” said Dr. Horbar.

VON’s integrated quality improvement services include databases for all NICU admissions, developmental follow-up for extremely preterm and extremely low birth weight infants, and a global database co-designed for quality improvement in lower resourced neonatal units. VON databases currently hold information on nearly five million infant records, and a growing number of members around the world are contributing to a shared understanding of NICU practices and outcomes by adding more than 275,000 infant records annually.

Taking action to improve the outcomes represented in the database was an important development in VON’s history. VON’s framework for quality improvement in neonatal care was honed over thirty years of improvement programs that has engaged more than 900 neonatal care teams. These quality improvement programs have been represented by countless publications and posters presented at conferences that addressed the most pressing and complex topics in neonatal care, ranging from chronic lung disease to opioid withdrawal.

“One of my most profound memories is of when we started our first quality collaborative with ten very committed centers looking at the data and collaborating. It was groundbreaking as it made you think outside the walls of your own institution and it set VON on the course to become the premier organization to move quality forward for newborns and their families,” said Dr. Soll.

The values of VON quality improvement programs mirror the values championed by Dr. Horbar and Dr. Soll, which include an adherence to measurement, evidence into practice, collaboration among multidisciplinary teams, inclusion of health equity principles, and keeping families the center of the work. The focus on families in particular made VON a pioneer as an organization of health professionals where family representatives are core faculty and equal team members with the clinical teams.

Addressing racial disparities is another area of improvement where VON stands out due to Dr. Horbar’s leadership. He coined the term “follow-through” to challenge clinical teams to look beyond the NICU walls and take action to address the social disparities of health that impact long term health and wellbeing of infants and families.

Dr. Horbar and Dr. Soll have been role models and mentors for improvement teams, researchers, and future leaders in newborn care. Their desire to spread knowledge, build quality improvement skills, and create connections between people with shared goals has led to a thriving community that will never stop learning from each other and helping each other advance improvement in the care of newborns and their families.

“I was drawn to neonatology because neonatal and perinatal medicine is such a team sport that places tremendous value on family-centered care,” said Dr. Ehret. “VON is an exemplar of multidisciplinary quality improvement and has transformed neonatology. I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to join the VON team as Director of Global Health and be personally mentored by Jeffrey and Roger since 2015. I, and the members of the leadership team, are poised and excited to continue their legacy of strengthening collaboration and building trusted communities to improve the health and wellbeing of vulnerable infants around the world.”

June 30, 2026

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Drew Arnold
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darnold@vtoxford.org