Kibbe to Step Down as CEO of DirectTrust

As the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT develops a Trusted Exchange Framework that could shake up the interoperability playing field, David Kibbe, M.D., M.B.A., announced he would step down as president and CEO of DirectTrust at the end of the year.

DirectTrust is a 6-year-old, non-profit entity created by and for participants in the Direct exchange community. DirectTrust supports both provider-to-provider and patient-to-provider exchange using the Direct message protocols.

Under Kibbe’s leadership, DirectTrust grew into an association of 121 health IT and provider organizations. It has created a “trust framework” that extends use of Direct exchange to more than 106,000 health care organizations and 1,582,373 Direct addresses/accounts. More than 300 EHR and PHR vendors’ products, and more than 50 HIEs, participate in the DirectTrust network.

A 25-year veteran of the healthcare IT industry, Dr. Kibbe was previously the founder of the American Academy of Family Physicians’ Center for Health IT, CEO of the web-based care coordination software company Canopy Systems, and a family physician with 20 years’ experience in private and academic medical practice.  He was one of the early developers of the Continuity of Care Record (CCR) standard, which was the precursor to the CCD-A and FHIR standards for computably formatted health data.

“On behalf of the entire board, we thank David for leading DirectTrust through a remarkable period of formation and growth, positioning the organization as a powerful entity dedicated to the advancement of secure, interoperable exchange of health information,” said Paul Uhrig, DirectTrust Board Chair, in a prepared statement.

After helping lead the transition to new executive management at DirectTrust later this year, Dr. Kibbe said he plans to remain professionally active in health IT.