Over the past six months ONC has launched a wide range of activities to support and learn from existing governance initiatives and advance our health information exchange (HIE) goals:

• Increasing interoperability
• Decreasing the cost and complexity of exchange
• Increasing trust among participants and with the public

New Cooperative Agreements to HIE Governance Entities

Today, we are announcing the award of cooperative agreements to two health information exchange governance organizations, DirectTrust and the EHR|HIE Interoperability Workgroup led by the New York eHealth Collaborative (NYeC). ONC will work closely with each of the entities and their partners to:

• develop and adopt policies, interoperability requirements and business practices that align with national priorities
• overcome interoperability challenges
• reduce implementation costs and
• assure the privacy and security of health information exchange.

Because these issues are important in helping achieve the secure exchange of health information nationwide, we urge ONC grantees, vendors, providers and health information exchange initiatives to participate actively and robustly in this collaborative work.

As part of the awards, these organizations will:

• DirectTrust will continue and expand their work to establish security and trust rules of the road for Directed exchange and advance adoption of these rules through their trusted agent accreditation program.  DirectTrust’s critical work will facilitate and enable vendor to vendor and provider to provider exchange for Meaningful Use Stage 2.

• The EHR|HIE Interoperability Workgroup will address some of the stickiest implementation challenges facing the exchange of health information including patient matching, querying provider directories and applying good governance principles for both query-based and directed exchange.

Stay Tuned for More Information

Over the coming weeks we will share additional information on the grantees’ workplans on HealthIT.gov.

We look forward to working with DirectTrust and the EHR|HIE Interoperability Workgroup and many of you to advance the vision of information following the patient securely where and when it is needed, across organizational, vendor, and geographic boundaries.