DirectTrust Supports 260 Million Direct Secure Messages in Q2 2022

DirectTrust saw a 14 percent increase in healthcare organizations leveraging direct secure messages In the second quarter of 2022 compared with the same period last year.

The non-profit healthcare industry alliance supports secure electronic exchanges of protected health information (PHI) between healthcare organizations, providers, and patients to support care coordination.

More than 260 million direct secure messages were sent and received within the DirectTrust network during the second quarter of 2022.

The end of Q2 metrics also revealed that the number of consumers using direct secure messaging increased one percent to more than 668,000, compared with the same quarter last year.

“We’re delighted to note the continued steady growth in transactions since we began tracking these in 2014, along with the continuing increase in the number of organizations served by direct secure messaging,” Scott Stuewe, DirectTrust president and CEO, noted in a press release. “We attribute the growth in the number of organizations using direct secure messaging to ongoing adoption in the post-acute market.”

On the other hand, the number of trusted Direct addresses able to share PHI dipped slightly (3.7 percent) to just over 2.6 million, compared with the same time last year.

Stuewe explained that the slight reduction in addresses identified during the second quarter resulted from four health information service providers (HISPs) removing many invalid addresses. He noted that all other HISPs saw an increase in direct addresses.

“These results are among the outcomes of improving data quality as part of our Directory Improvement Initiative, through which we’ve been working with our HISPs to identify and remove invalid addresses from our system,” said Stuewe.

“Our Directory development work is focused on first identifying data quality issues,” Stuewe continued. “We then will turn to making it easier for systems to access the directory utilizing a FHIR-based query approach. Our overall goal is to improve the use and usability of direct secure messaging, by making it easier to discover the best direct address to use for a given purpose.”