Just more than a year after Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) awarded DirectTrust.org one of its Exemplar HIE Government Program Cooperative Agreements, the ONC has renewed the agreement for a second year. DirectTrust said it has either met or surpassed ONC’s goals for the Exemplar HIE Governance Program.
The Exemplar Health Information Exchange Governance Program has a few different focuses, such as overcoming interoperability challenges and reducing implementation costs, but it also aims to help organizations ensure HIE privacy and security. As organizations continue to gain connectivity between disparate systems and attempt to achieve interoperability, HIE privacy and security is an absolute must and the work being done through Direct is an important piece in those efforts.
DirectTrust, a non-profit trade alliance that facilitates secure, health information exchange (HIE) through the Direct Protocol, forms secure HIE policies and standards and has partnered with the Electronic Healthcare Network Accreditation Commission (EHNAC) to form a voluntary accreditation program for Health Information Services Providers (HISPs). The value in being an accredited HISP is being able to share digital certificates transparently and efficiently for those using Direct without dealing with concerns of who to trust.
“This is a time when identity theft and privacy concerns are prevalent, so securing patients’ personal health information in Direct messages – and trusting the identity between senders – is a must,” DirectTrust President and CEO David C. Kibbe, MD, said. “In a remarkably short period of time, our members have created a national network for secure and trusted health data exchange over the Internet. EHR users in hospitals, medical practices, and other health care facilities, as well as their patients, will all benefit from the ability to move data securely across organizational and IT boundaries via Direct. The work has been done on time, and on target.”
ONC continued the DirectTrust partnership after it met the “deadlines and milestones for growth of its trust community.” For example, it easily surpassed the goal of 50 accreditation and audit programs encompassing privacy, security, and trust-in-identity controls by bringing in 49 enrollee organizations into more than 80 programs. “Over the past year, DirectTrust worked hard to promote good governance practices and enable the exchange of health information,” said Kory Mertz, the Challenge Grant Director at the ONC. “We expect that in the second year of the contract, DirectTrust will continue this success and help to enable HISP-to-HISP interoperability among their participants.”