DirectTrust Conference to Improve HIE Interoperability Practices

Civitas Networks for Health and DirectTrust announced a joint conference, The Civitas Networks for Health 2022 Annual Conference, a Collaboration with the DirectTrust Summit, to share ideas with industry leaders to enhance best practices for health information exchange (HIE) and interoperability.

The conference will particularly center on using health data collaboration to support health equity. The conference will be held in San Antonio, Texas, the organization stated.

The event aims to provide attendees with actionable ideas that can be implemented in their respective communities, the announcement stated.

“Interoperable health data and multi-stakeholder cross-sector approaches to health information exchange and improvement are absolutely critical in local and national efforts to reduce health disparities and achieve equitable outcomes,” Lisa Bari, Civitas Networks for Health CEO, stated in the announcement.

“Civitas and DirectTrust members have built trusted, connected, and innovative solutions to serve their communities,” Bari added. “This conference aims to highlight this innovation and brings recognition to the importance of partnerships.”

In addition, the conference will focus on key subjects shaping health improvement efforts directed at increasing health equity.

Both Civitas Networks for Health and DirectTrust aim to involve proposals from leaders in HIE and interoperability, the social determinants of health, value-based care, health disparities, quality improvement, health care affordability, measurement, and reporting.

Civitas Networks for Health is a new organization formed through a partnership between the Network for Regional Healthcare Improvement (NRHI) and the Strategic Health Information Exchange Collaborative (SHIEC) in October 2021.

For its part, DirectTrust has also improved HIEs through direct secure messaging, which aims to better provider-to-provider communication. Direct secure messaging enables better communication resulting in fewer organizational inefficiencies.

DirectTrust has seen an uptick in the number of consumers leveraging their direct secure messaging; in the fourth quarter of 2021, the number of consumers increased by 16 percent.

In total, over 945 million direct secure messages were sent and received within the DirectTrust network during 2021. The number of direct secure messages represents a 31 percent increase over the total number of transactions in 2020.

In addition, the number of trusted direct addresses sharing protected health information (PHI) increased 12 percent year-over-year to nearly 2.8 million.

"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, stated in a press release. "Our volume rebounded to over 100 million more transactions than we saw in 2019, making 2021 our best year yet."

The healthcare industry alliance has supported over 2.9 billion direct secure messages since DirectTrust had started tracking digital transaction exchanges in 2014.