DirectTrust Facilitates Over 191M Direct Secure Messages in Q1 2022

DirectTrust supported more than 191 million direct secure messages during the first quarter of 2022, representing an 11 percent increase over the same quarter in 2021.

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

Direct secure messaging enables better communication, which can result in fewer organizational inefficiencies, DirectTrust mentioned.

In this first quarter, DirectTrust exceeded 3 billion direct secure messages since the organization began tracking the statistics in 2014, an average of more than 63 million transactions per month.

DirectTrust also saw an increase in healthcare organization members served by health information service providers (HISPs). As of 2022, the number of consumers using DirectTrust direct secure messaging grew by 17 percent to more than 302,000 compared to last year.

Within the network, the number of DirectTrust addresses sharing protected health information PHI also increased roughly 7 percent to more than 2.8 million.

“We continue to be impressed with the growth in the number of organizations participating in Direct Secure Messaging and the DirectTrust Network,” Scott Stuewe, president and CEO of DirectTrust, said in a statement. “It’s incredible that 10 years after our April 2012 founding, we’re celebrating surpassing 300 thousand organizations able to participate in Direct, as well as more than 3 billion messages exchanged.”

The number of patients and consumers leveraging Direct Secure Messaging also jumped 2 percent over the last quarter to more than 670,000. Some of DirectTrust’s new members include Cloud Privacy Labs, Greg Meyer, Open Referral, Otis Health, and PracticalMarkets.

“As we forge toward the future, we continue to place emphasis in areas complementary to the tenants of trust and identity embedded in Direct and DirectTrust,” Stuewe stated. “Our standards work is expanding into the area of human services health information exchange, and the nuanced topics of patient identity and a national patient identifier. We encourage organizations who are interested in the expansion of Direct and standards work to join us.”

DirectTrust continues to see a significant uptick in year-over-year Direct exchange transactions.

In 2021, more than 945 million Direct Secure Messages were sent and received within the DirectTrust network. The number of direct secure messages represented a 31 percent increase over the total number of transactions in 2020.

The growth in direct secure messaging appeared to be fueled by new use cases, such as admission, discharge, and transfer (ADT) event notifications, Stuewe noted.

“The cleanup associated with this effort, along with changes in strategy where some organizations are using Direct addresses based on departments or teams rather than individuals, may have resulted in a reduction in the total number of addresses in use,” Stuewe said.