Healthcare Directory Initiatives

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology’s (ONC) Shared Nationwide Interoperability Roadmap includes a call to action to advance the nation’s provider directory efforts. On April 5th and 6th, 2016, ONC and the Federal Health Architecture (FHA) jointly hosted a Provider Directory Workshop to convene public and private stakeholders to review challenges, share successes, and generate new ideas around provider directory standards and solutions. Although participants described different use cases for healthcare directories, they agreed that data quality is a persistent challenge across the industry.

To address concerns about data quality, reduce administrative burden, and improve consumer satisfaction, ONC and FHA launched a new healthcare directory effort in July 2016. The project seeks to: (1) define the architecture of a proposed national resource of validated healthcare directory data, and (2) develop an HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) Based Implementation Guide describing the exchange of information between a national resource of validated healthcare directory data and local environments (e.g. provider organizations, payers, HIEs)

The proposed national resource would include a broad set of provider data that supports a variety of healthcare directory use cases. Data would be validated against primary sources (e.g. state licensing boards for licensure information) and available to local environments through a national exchange standard. Providers would only have to attest to much of their information once for the national resource, rather than for each local environment.

 ONC/FHA’s Healthcare Directory effort is comprised of the Technology Learning Community (TLC) and four tiger teams.