Tag: The Direct Project

From EHR to HIE and Back

Aug 11, 2011

By MARGALIT GUR-ARIE

According to the latest count, there are 255 Health Information Exchange (HIE) organizations across the country, which amounts to an average of 5 in each State. If you are a practicing physician and have an EHR, chances are someone already knocked on your door offering to connect your practice to the local HIE for a small fee. If you don’t have an EHR, you may have had offers to access an HIE web portal, or maybe an HIE supplied EHR Lite, allowing you to at the very least view clinical data from other sources. Perhaps for free. If you are the proud owner of one of the full-featured EHRs, you may wonder what an HIE can do for you that your EHR is not already doing, and whether that service is worth your hard earned money.

In theory, a top-shelf EHR should be able to connect your practice to multiple facilities and allow you to exchange information to the best of all participants’ abilities. Granted most EHRs are still working on some of the connections, particularly to local facilities, but all in all, an EHR should be able to eventually provide for all your connectivity needs as shown in Figure 1. Note that for some types of connections, your EHR vendor can use a clearinghouse or portal approach to simplify and reduce costs of connectivity. For example, you don’t need a separate interface for each pharmacy – you use Surescripts as the clearinghouse and let them worry about it. You also don’t need an individual connection to each patient’s home – you communicate with all of them through one portal. With the exception of Surescripts pharmacy connectivity and a small number of reference labs, each connection, or interface, is costing you a pretty penny, and the more local the connection, the longer it takes to build.

Why Direct is a Hit and PCAST is an Outcast

Apr 15, 2011• 2

By VINCE KURAITIS

Regular readers know that I find Professor Clay Christen’s theory of disruptive innovation to be a useful lens to explain industry evolution. Let’s look at two recent health IT initiatives and see why one is working and the other is stalled.

Characterizing the Direct Project — why it’s working:

A low-end industry disruption. The Direct Project takes transactions that are routine but inefficient — fax, telephone, mail exchanges between health care providers — and specifies standardized, Internet based technologies to conduct them electronically.
Incremental change — a few specified transactions.
Bottom up — ONC hired a capable project manager (Arien Malec) who choreographed a small team of volunteers working under short deadlines.
Implementing “better, faster, cheaper” technology on the fly (i.e., Internet transactions replace fax, phone).
Under the radar — invoking little response from incumbents. Direct was seen as focusing on transactions that were peripheral to the core EHR.Continue reading…

Getting DIRECTLy to the Point

Feb 21, 2011

By RICH ELMORE and ARIEN MALEC

A patient’s health records are no longer confined to a doctor’s office, shelved inside a dusty file cabinet. With the advent of the Nationwide Health Information Network, a framework of standards, services and policies that allow health practitioners to securely exchange health data, medical records digitized to be easily shared between doctor’s offices, hospitals, benefit providers, government agencies and other health organizations, all across America.

This health information exchange is dramatically enhanced by the Direct Project. Launched in March 2010, the Direct Project was created to enable a simple, direct, secure and scalable way for participants to send authenticated, encrypted health information to known, trusted recipients over the Internet in support of Stage 1 Meaningful Use requirements. The Direct Project has more than 200 participants from over 60 different organizations. These participants include EHR and PHR vendors, medical organizations, systems integrators, integrated delivery networks, federal organizations, state and regional health information organizations, organizations that provide health information exchange capabilities, and health information technology vendors.

On February 1, the Department of Health and Human Services and the White House announced the first live, production uses of Direct for sending medical records securely among providers. Additionally, EHR and PHR vendors announced support for Direct, allowing many types of system-to-system messaging including sending health information to a patient’s PHR or sending a referral to a consulting physician. These developments are an accelerator to achieving directed health messaging much faster than before predicted, using the Internet!

This month, at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society 2011 Conference (HIMSS 11) in Orlando, Fla., eight Direct Project pilots will be demonstrated and discussed. These projects include a collaboration with the Department of Veterans Affairs and a regional health information exchange network known as CareSpark; a demonstration that will explain how the Direct Project technical standards and services are being used to securely transport immunization data in Minnesota; and a project that shows how Albany Medical Center is able to send a closed-loop referral from primary care provider to specialist and back.

These and additional projects are included below with a brief description of the work.

Healthcare Messages Over the Internet: The Direct Project

Nov 29, 2010• 7

By BRIAN AHIER, RICH ELMORE and DAVID C. KIBBE, MD

The Direct Project announced today the completion of its open-source connectivity-enabling software and the start of a series of pilots that will be demonstrating directed secure messaging for healthcare stakeholders over the internet. The Direct Project specifies a simple, secure, scalable, standards-based way for participants to send authenticated, encrypted health information directly to known, trusted recipients over the Internet.

Also announced:

A new name – the Direct Project was previously known as NHIN Direct
An NHIN University course, The Direct Project – Where We Are Today, to be presented by Arien Malec, November 29 at 1 PM ET, sponsored by the National eHealth Collaborative
An extensive list of HIT vendors (20+) that have announced plans to leverage the Direct Project for message transport in connection with their solutions and services
Presentations at the HIT Standards Committee on Tuesday November 30 where three or more vendors will be announcing their support for the Direct Project.
A thorough documentation library including a Direct Project Overview
Best practice guidance for directed messaging based on the policy work of the Privacy and Security Tiger team
A new web site at DirectProject.org
A new hashtag #directproject for following the Direct Project on twitter.

The Direct Project is the collaborative and voluntary work of a group of healthcare stakeholders representing more than 50 provider, state, HIE and HIT vendor organizations. Over 200 participants have contributed to the project. It’s rapid progress, transparency, and community consensus approach have established it as a model of how to drive innovation at a national level.

What is The Direct Project?

Today, communication of health information among providers and patients is most often achieved by sending paper through the mail or via fax. The Direct Project seeks to benefit patients and providers by improving the transport of health information, making it faster, more secure, and less expensive. The Direct Project will facilitate “direct” communication patterns with an eye toward approaching more advanced levels of interoperability than simple paper can provide.

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