HealthToGo Facilitates Secure, Consumer-Mediated Exchange of Personal Health Data

SAN DIEGO, Feb. 22, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- EMR Direct, a leading developer of software for the secure exchange of health information over the Internet, today announced that its HealthToGo™ software is a Phase 2 winner of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) Move Health Data Forward Challenge. Winners advancing to the final stage of the challenge successfully prototyped solutions that allow consumers to easily and securely share their personal health information with their health care providers, family members or other caregivers using application programming interfaces (APIs) that leverage the Health Relationship Trust (HEART) profiles for UMA, OAuth, and OpenID. In Phase 3, participants will deploy their solutions at scale.

HealthToGo delivers on the long-awaited goal of allowing every patient to build their own personal health care networks. In the simplest use case, a patient uses HealthToGo to access his or her health data at a single healthcare facility. In the most complex use case, a patient uses HealthToGo to link his or her healthcare records, wherever they may be, authorizing or revoking access to that data for any other provider or patient representative. Included in the HealthToGo solution are methods for distributed identity management among trusted services using other new standards such as Context in Direct and the Unified Data Access Profile; EMR Direct leadership spearheaded the development of both standards. HealthToGo can thus be used to build the highly sought-after longitudinal patient record, while minimizing the number of digital identities users need to maintain in order to do so.

EMR Direct has an established track record of making it easy to enable broad healthcare interoperability and of contributing to the development and active use of Healthcare IT interoperability standards. Over one hundred vendors who certified for Direct Project-related criteria under the ONC 2014 Edition requirements have integrated EMR Direct software into their products. In keeping with these interoperability objectives, EMR Direct introduced Interoperability Engine for Application Access API enablement and the HealthToGo client application for use in viewing data with these APIs, which are new in the ONC 2015 Edition certification criteria. EMR Direct’s Application Access and Direct Messaging integration tools are available to Health IT developers seeking ONC 2014 or 2015 Edition certification.

The Move Health Data Forward Challenge builds on ONC’s work with the HEART Workgroup’s security, privacy, and health information technology stakeholders collaborating to develop a set of data access authorization specifications. These efforts are part of a larger community-driven movement toward helping individuals and clinicians benefit from the full potential of health information technology.

About EMR Direct

EMR Direct is a privately-held company headquartered in San Diego, California, that provides Direct Messaging HISP services, Application Access APIs, and the supporting user interface, public key infrastructure (PKI), and identity management services required for secure health information exchange. With the goal of simplifying interoperability and enabling custom workflows, EMR Direct’s software is easy to deploy and does not require expensive, one-off, peer-to-peer interfaces. EMR Direct is committed to protecting patient privacy, facilitating consumer-mediated exchange, improving the quality and coordination of care, increasing productivity, and reducing costs.

Trademark Notice: HealthToGo is a trademark of EMR Direct. HL7 and FHIR are registered trademarks of Health Level Seven International.