(PD) Provider Directories

New to the Provider Directories Initiative? Review the Provider Directories Initiative Overview for an introduction to the overall initiative.

Consensus approved final work products:

Challenge

Health information exchange requires a mechanism to obtain a digital certificate or security information (public keys) and electronic service information including electronic addresses – such as Direct Address, NHIN Exchange Gateway Address, IP Address, SOAP service address, REST end point address, and other service addresses to facilitate secure exchange of health data. Today, this functionality is generally supported by consistent and standardized electronic means, but not adopted widely. A scalable and standardized solution will be needed in order to efficiently, accurately, and reliably query and obtain digital certificates or security information (public keys) and electronic service information including electronic addresses to enable health information exchange.

Purpose and Goals

Based on a combination of feedback from the HIT Standards Committee and Sprint Team members, recent lessons learned from earlier work within Provider Directories, and prioritization by the S&I Steering team, the two work streams for the first phase of the Provider Directories Initiative have been revised. They include:

• Certificate discovery for Direct Project with a known Direct Address
• Electronic Service Information discovery (including Electronic Addresses) with some known basic provider attributes

In order to meet the anticipated objectives and current timeline of Meaningful Use Stage 2 as well as the HIT Standards Committee’s mandate, the first work stream will refocus on discovering certificates when a Direct Address is known to support exchange of health information. The development of a Use Case and evaluation of existing standards within the first work stream will be targeted for completion by the end of August 2011. Prototypes/Reference Implementation will be targeted for completion by September in time for Meaningful Use Stage 2 rule-making.

The second work stream will focus on discovering electronic service information including electronic addresses from Provider Directories with some known provider attributes. This second work stream also aligns with Meaningful Use and aims to enable providers and provider systems to electronically obtain electronic service information including electronic addresses of the desired destination to support secure exchanging of health information. This work stream will also address the core data set, data model, and schema that are needed to support queries to Provider Directories for electronic service information including electronic addresses. The development of a Use Case, core dataset, data model, and schema, as well as the mapping of the data model to standards (specifically LDAP, HPD, and X12) within this work stream will be targeted for completion by the end of August 2011. An optional, community-driven effort may be developed to identify standards for electronic service information discovery from Provider Directories. The timeline for this effort will be driven by the community and facilitated by Community Leads. Solutions developed from this work is critical to support multiple HIEs, however, inclusion into regulation for Meaningful Use Stage 2 is not planned at this point..

The objectives of this initial phase include:

• Healthcare participants can look up digital certificate information (and, optionally, electronic address) to facilitate secure exchange of information through Direct Project
• Data model that HIEs/PDs can adopt to enable query and response for electronic service information including electronic address, with corollary benefits to data governance, PD instantiation, etc.
• Standardized query mechanism for Provider Directories that can be adopted by EHR vendors, State HIEs, HISPs and other mediators of exchange (this outcome will be community-driven i.e. optional)
• Standardization and simplification of EHR implementations of interfaces to query Provider Directories for electronic service information including electronic addresses and Certificate Directories for digital certificates (this outcome will be community-driven i.e. optional)