NATE Blue Button Trust Bundle Created for Patients to Get Their Data

The National Association for Trusted Exchange (NATE) has created a trust bundle which will aim to help create a more interoperable patient-mediated exchange, according to an announcement from NATE.

The NATE Blue Button for Consumers (NBB4C) Trust Bundle was introduced during the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) for Health IT's annual meeting this week in Washington, D.C. The bundle  helps relying parties to identify consumer facing applications (CFAs) that meet or exceed criteria considered to be the most important characteristics of a trustworthy steward of consumer health information, while still enabling patients to benefit from the value of having access to their health information, officials say.

The NBB4C Trust Bundle is the result of NATE’s ongoing PHR Ignite Project and incorporates lessons learned from NATE‟s administration of the Blue Button Consumer Trust Bundles. Participation in the trust bundle will facilitate secure exchange of health information from provider-controlled applications to consumer-controlled applications using Direct secure messaging protocols.

Our industry achieved a major milestone today," NATE CEO Aaron Seib said in a statement. "We studied the issues around securely sharing information from providers to patients and together we took a leap of faith. Consumers across the country will now have more control over their care…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.”