Cloud-Based Health IT Vendor Joins DirectTrust Interoperability Network

Healthcare industry alliance DirectTrust has added cloud-based health IT vendor etherFAX to its interoperability network.

etherFAX supports data sharing from various applications and endpoint devices through its Secure Exchange Network (SEN), the world's largest fax network.

"Becoming a member of DirectTrust reinforces our commitment to providing healthcare organizations with the most secure document delivery solution in the industry," Paul Banco, CEO and co-founder of etherFAX, said in a public statement.

The cloud-based vendor's DirectFax solution via SEN allows healthcare organizations to exchange patient health information and unstructured data directly to applications and devices.

Officials noted that by leveraging the security of fax technology with the scalability of the cloud, DirectFax delivers high-resolution, full-color documents in seconds.

With the addition of etherFAX to the DirectTrust interoperability network, members will be able to send and receive direct secure messages from today's popular fax servers and third-party messaging platforms like Microsoft Teams, Slack, and Microsoft Fax and mobile applications.

The DirectTrust network contains nearly three million direct addresses across roughly 3,000 organizations.

The healthcare industry alliance recently announced that it has supported more than 945 million direct secure messages during 2021, representing a 31 percent increase over the total number of transactions in 2020.

Since DirectTrust began tracking transactions in 2014, the organization has facilitated nearly 2.9 billion direct secure messages, an average of more than 79 million transactions per month.

In the fourth quarter of 2021, the number of consumers using direct secure messaging increased nearly 16 percent compared to the same period a year ago. The number of trusted direct addresses sharing protected health information (PHI) also grew 12 percent year-over-year.

"In 2021, we saw a return to strong growth in message volume and in the number of organizations with access to direct secure messaging, after seeing a dip related to the pandemic in 2020," Scott Stuewe, president and CEO of DirectTrust, said in a press release. "Our volume rebounded to over 100 million more transactions than we saw in 2019, making 2021 our best year yet."