NATE demonstrates trust bundle for patient-mediated exchange

The National Association for Trusted Exchange (NATE) has demonstrated its new NATE Blue Button for Consumers Trust Bundle (NBB4C), which facilitates interoperability for patient-mediated exchange.

In the display, which took place at the 2015 ONC Annual Meeting, Greg Meyer, director and distinguished engineer at Cerner, showed how a provider using a Cerner EMR can simply push a patient record to the patient's personal health record (PHR), in this case to the Humetrix iBlueButton app running on the patient's smartphone, according to a release.

The new bundle allows parties to identify consumer-facing applications (CFAs) that meet or exceed certain trustworthiness criteria while enabling patients to access their health information. Participation in the trust bundle will facilitate secure exchange of health data from provider-controlled applications to consumer-controlled applications such as PHRs using Direct.

The demonstration “shows that the NBB4C is ready now to enable real-world exchange between provider-facing applications and consumer-facing applications, empowering the consumer to get access to their data,” said NATE’s CEO Aaron Seib in a statement. “I look forward to the day when patients across the nation routinely download their health information into a consumer-facing application of their choice and use it to improve their lives and the lives of those they love.”

Over the past year, NATE and a task group of stakeholders developed a set of criteria and expectations for patient-mediated exchanges. In November 2014, NATE crowdsourced the trust framework, calling for and receiving comments from across the industry. In January 2015, the NATE Board of Directors approved the workgroup’s recommendation for release into production, according to the association.

Learn more about the trust bundle.