DirectTrust is seeking participants for a new Information Exchange for Human Services (IX4HS) Consensus Body for the purpose of proposing new national standards.
According to the nonprofit organization, the IX4HS project will evaluate and identify existing and developing standards (including the Direct Standard), or create new standards or profiles as needed for the secure communication of sensitive information between healthcare settings and human services organizations, and between human services organizations for the purposes of endpoint discovery, referral, information exchange and requests, and care coordination.
The IX4HS Consensus Body is seeking members from the following sectors:
• Healthcare
• Government
• Healthcare Payer
• Consumer/General Interest
• Information Technology
• Interoperability and Systems Integration
“Our goal in forming the IX4HS Consensus Body is to create a specification for the use of particular standards to support specific use cases and purposes to enable healthcare organizations interacting with human services providers to refer, follow, coordinate, and measure the outcomes of their ‘social determinants of health’ initiatives,” said Scott Stuewe, DirectTrust president and CEO, in a statement.
“Communications with and between human services providers should be available in existing clinical systems’ EHRs using interoperable standards that ensure security, protect privacy, enhance usability, and are reliable, scalable, and affordable. And perhaps most importantly, they should be acceptable to human services providers with a widely varying level of systems and users’ competencies,” Stuewe continued.
The organization noted that Direct Secure Messaging, which uses the foundation of the Direct Standard, is already in use by many players in human services for secure communication, although some workflows have yet to be profiled. This consensus body will identify the excellent work of other existing standards bodies and initiatives to further profile them with Direct as a transport mechanism,”Stuewe concluded.
Those interested in joining the IX4HS Consensus Body are asked to contact [email protected].
