Webinar: Progress report for Direct, Standards & Interoperability Framework

More than 65 organizations, including IT vendors and integrated delivery systems, have planned support for the Direct Project, according to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC). In addition, 20 states have ONC-approved HIE plans that incorporate Direct as part of their health IT plans, said Arien Malec, coordinator of the ONC's Direct Project and Standards & Interoperability Framework, speaking at a March 21 Webinar sponsored by the National eHealth Collaborative.

“You can see that we have potential to make a significant impact across the country both in terms of population of patients serviced by a major health IT upgrade, as well as by the percentage of providers and patients who are served by this major upgrade,” Malec said.

The ONC has approved state HIE plans for: Alabama, California, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, Vermont, West Virginia and Wisconsin. 

In addition, several key Direct Project specifications are now complete or in late-stage draft, and reference implementations are compete and production-tested, he said. The specifications documents help define and shape the wider adoption of Direct Project technology by healthcare stakeholders.

• The Applicability Statement for Simple Health Transport outlines the core requirements for a system to declare itself a fully qualified and compliant Health Information Service Provider.
• The Direct Project Compliance Statement (in draft) defines the conditions to participate in universal addressing and transport.
• For organizations that have adopted Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) standards, the XDR and XDM for Direct Messaging Specification defines a specific gateway between the core Direct Project specification and senders and receivers who use IHE specifications.

“We’re incredibly optimistic about where Direct is going, but realistic about the timeframes that it takes to do this upgrade,” Malec said. “We expect over the course of 2011, we’ll see products going into production supporting Direct.”

Standards & Interoperability (S&I)
Building on the Direct Project is the ONC’s Standards & Interoperability Framework, which intends to do the same challenge-based, mission-based focused efforts on major interoperability challenges in support of quality outcomes, Malec said. Each initiative attempts to address a key aspect of semantic interoperability. S&I initiatives now under way address two key needs:

1. Incorporation of lab results in EHRs at reduced cost, with lower complexities and in less time.
2. Support for clinically integrated transitions of care.

“We need a way of getting information from Point A to Point B and we need to make sure that the information is transitioned in a way that both parties have good knowledge of what information is being transitioned,” said Malec.

The S&I initiative is focusing on creating a modular set of data that can be used in all transitions of care with the ability to add on additional information as needed. “This is the next ground in the struggle for improved health and healthcare,” he added.

“We will keep pushing the mission and will keep pushing the focus to enable high-quality care for all Americans.”