Partnership for Patients

Partnership for Patients

Facilitating a comprehensive view of patient information for EHRs, PHRs and HISPs

Today, patients likely visit a number of providers, each of whom may have a medical specialty.  This can present a challenge to ensure that medical professionals have visibility and access to important medical information specific to their patients.

The DirectTrust Partnership for Patients Program makes it much easier for patients to share information with their medical professionals at hospitals, medical practices and thousands of other healthcare provider locations.

IdenTrust provide products and services to Electronic Health Record/Electronic Medical Record (eHR/eMR) application providers, Patient Healthcare Record (PHR) application providers and Health Information Service Providers (HISP) enabling their participation in the DirectTrust Partnership for Patients Program.  IdenTrust can also provide certificates to prescribers and patients as instructed by eHR/eMR, PHR and HISP participants.

IdenTrust participates in the DirectTrust Partnership for Patients Program as both a Certification Authority (CA) and a Registration Authority (RA), accredited by EHNAC for DirectTrust identity proofing and certificate issuance. IdenTrust DirectTrust Patient Certificates are also cross-certified with the U.S. Federal Bridge Certification Authority (FBCA), meaning they can be relied upon for health information exchange with U.S. Federal healthcare organizations such as the Veterans Administration (VA), the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the Indian Health Service (IHS) and other agencies.

IdenTrust provides a secure, but very simple web services interface for integration with the IdenTrust Certification Authority (CA) and Registration Authority (RA) services. DirectTrust certificates issued by IdenTrust are part of the service provided by you to your customers. Patient certificates inclusive of required identity proofing are offered at a very low price, overcoming the cost barrier for providing patient level Direct Addresses. IdenTrust partners in the DirectTrust Partnership for Patients Program are expected to pass on these cost savings to patients with minimal markup to achieve program goals.

 

Electronic Healthcare/Medical Record (eHR/eMR), Patient Healthcare Record (PHR) and Healthcare Information Service Providers (HISPs) can retain control of customer/patient relationships to the extent desired, while making the identity proofing and certificate issuance process easy and painless for providers or patients. IdenTrust does not provide Direct Addresses, so involving an EHNAC accredited DirectTrust HISP for assignment of addresses is crucial.

DirectTrust Logo

DirectTrust is a collaborative, non-profit alliance of more than 150 health IT and healthcare provider organizations who have joined forces to support secure, interoperable health information exchange via the Direct message protocols.

DirectTrust enables:

  • Authentication of health information senders and recipients
  • Secure, encrypted communication between healthcare professionals and their patients
  • Healthcare to patient communication
  • Transition of patient care
  • Interoperability between proprietary eHR/eMR applications
  • Compliance with Meaningful Use

IdenTrust leverages more than two (2) decades of individual identity proofing experience to make the process easy and affordable for patients. The IdenTrust goal is to eliminate the previous barriers of cost and complexity associated with allowing patients to control their own healthcare data and share it only as needed with healthcare professionals.

Very simply, your healthcare or patient portal provider will:

 

  • Provide a method to collect information from you that allows IdenTrust to complete an automated identity proofing process;
  • Request that you provide a secret code generated by IdenTrust and provided directly to you, ensuring that the address assigned and associated certificate is bound to you, the identity proofed patient; and
  • Securely protect the certificate associated with your assigned address and ensure health information sent to you and shared by you with healthcare professionals is handled securely.

Depending on your healthcare provider and their implementation, you may be provided a certificate to be stored in your home computer browser or mobile phone, a token with a certificate or even a token or authenticator used to authenticate you and allow use of your certificate for health information exchange. No matter the implementation method, it is important that you do not share your password or authenticator with others.

 

While this process has often cost as much as $75 to $100 to complete, IdenTrust is able to offer ID proofing starting at far less per year, inclusive of NIST 800-63 LOA3 identity proofing and an IdenTrust DirectTrust Patient Certificate.

 

Your healthcare provider likely already participates in DirectTrust for communication with other providers. Let them know you are interested in receiving your healthcare information electronically and (if desired) that you would like to share healthcare information with other healthcare providers within the DirectTrust community.

Direct Messaging is built on a transport technology similar to email with an embedded and proven security technology called public key infrastructure (PKI). Certificates are used to ensure secure, encrypted communication between designated addresses in the DirectTrust community, analogous to a sealed envelope sent via registered mail with signature required in the paper world. All participants in DirectTrust undergo identity verification, ensuring healthcare information shared is only between the intended physicians, provider organizations and patients. DirectTrust participants do not generally see this underlying technology, which is managed by accredited Healthcare Information Service Providers (HISPs). Rest assured, information exchanged within the DirectTrust community is authenticated, secure and encrypted.

Contact IdenTrust IGC Sales at [email protected] for a free web meeting to learn more about DirectTrust® integration options.