The 2026 Stevie Awards for Technology Excellence just handed out five wins to Dr. Brandy Zachary and TDZ Functional Medicine Academy (TDZ-FMA), including two Golds, in a field that drew more than 700 nominations from 37 countries. But the headline number isn’t really the story. What’s more interesting is the stack of products the judges were actually scoring: a lab-interpretation engine, an AI care-plan generator, a 35-tool practitioner platform, and a consumer-facing diagnostic app, all built by a practitioner-turned-founder who taught herself to code her own solution before she ever pitched it to anyone else.
LabDX and Care Plan Builder: turning three hours of charting into three minutes
The clinical core of the ecosystem is LabDX, software that ingests more than 65 lab panel types, spanning blood, stool, urine, and specialty testing like GI-MAP, DUTCH, and OATs, into a single functional medicine analysis engine. Its Care Plan Builder module then takes that lab output, layers in unstructured patient intake data, and generates a phased, sequenced care plan with built-in contraindication logic, safety checks, referral triggers, and meal planning.
The efficiency claim is the kind of number that gets a technology product noticed by judges: a process that traditionally consumed three-plus hours of manual charting compressed into roughly three minutes per case. In April 2026 alone, the platform processed 602 lab interpretations and generated 454 finished care plans, a 75 percent conversion rate from raw lab data to a usable clinical output. That combination of scale and safety architecture earned LabDX and Care Plan Builder the Silver Stevie for Technical Innovation of the Year in Digital Health & Health IT Providers, with judges noting that no competing platform merges as many panel types into a single sequenced plan.
The Dr. Z Way App: the business layer, not just the clinical one
Where LabDX handles diagnostics, The Dr. Z Way App handles everything else a practitioner needs to run a practice. It’s a single platform hosting more than 35 tools covering clinical workflows, business operations, marketing, sales funnels, and state-specific legal and financial guidance tied to a practitioner’s license type. Judges recognized it separately from the rest of the ecosystem, awarding it Gold for Technical Innovation of the Year in Educational Technology, a signal that the platform stands on its own as an operating system for a functional medicine practice rather than a bundled add-on.
DiagnoseThis: taking the clinical logic to patients directly
The fourth product in the stack, DiagnoseThis, developed by Core DT Solutions LLC, flips the same underlying logic toward consumers. It generates personalized health “WHY Reports” for patients and routes them to credentialed functional medicine practitioners, extending LabDX’s interpretive engine to the people the clinical software was ultimately built to serve. It picked up a Bronze Stevie for New Product of the Year.
A Bronze for the ecosystem itself
Beyond the individual products, judges also recognized the full TDZ-FMA Clinical Technology Ecosystem as a Technology Breakthrough of the Year winner, pointing to the combination of accredited clinical education (through ACCME, ACPE, and ANCC across 10 national credentialing bodies) with AI-assisted clinical software as a differentiator few competitors can match.
Built by someone who needed it first
The technology has an origin story that’s unusual for a health tech stack this size. Dr. Zachary built the first version of what became LabDX for herself, after a traumatic brain injury and a later health collapse left her without a diagnosis, on disability, and unable to get answers from conventional medicine. She reactivated her own clinical license, ordered her own labs, and taught herself to interpret data that no other provider would take the time to explain. That manual process, repeated for patients once she reopened her practice, became the blueprint for the software now used by an estimated 700 practitioners daily.
Winners will be honored at a ceremony on October 28, 2026, in Paris, alongside the 2026 Stevie Awards for Great Employers and The International Business Awards. But for a health tech ecosystem still expanding its practitioner base, the more relevant validation is the product story itself: four connected tools, each solving a distinct piece of the same problem, all judged against technology companies well outside the healthcare space and coming out on top.
