RAIN Live Oak Demonstrates New Standard for Healthcare Provider Directories

Last month, RAIN Live Oak, a member of the California Association of Health Information Exchanges (CaHIE), participated in the Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) Connectathon 2015 to demonstrate the IHE Profile for Healthcare Provider Directory (HPD). Participation in the Connectahon, a week-long interoperability-testing event, was a significant opportunity for the advancement of the HPD standard, which supports management of healthcare provider information in a directory structure, and it proved to be an undeniable success. RAIN is a participant of the California Trusted Exchange Network (CTEN), which utilizes a federated architecture for Directory Services using HPD specifications.

“IHE Connectathon 2015 was a huge success for development of the Healthcare Provider Directory standard,” said Ayami Tyndall, System Manager for RAIN. “The successful testing of the Federated Option paves the way for statewide and interstate directory services. Broader adoption of HPD will help accelerate health information exchange and break down barriers between healthcare organizations, greatly improving and expediting care.”

With over a dozen vendors testing HPD deployments, the experience brought diverse systems from across the country together to demonstrate interoperability and the flexibility of the HPD standard. HPD directory structure is a listing of both individual providers and organizational providers with information that are classified by provider type, specialties, credentials, demographics and service locations. Also included is the providers’ Direct email address. IHE has been developing this profile in collaboration with the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC), Interoperability Workgroup (IWG) and eHealth Exchange.

During the Connectathon, RAIN participated with an in-house developed HPD environment built on open-source software and updated for the new Federation Option of HPD. RAIN worked in three roles during the Connectathon: Directory Provider, Directory Consumer, and Federated Directory Consumer. The third role was the most important, using a newly developed search interface to query federated directories and return consolidated results that are user friendly and easily readable. The main feature of the new Federated Option is the inclusion of LDAP Controls: metdata attached to directory requests to carry federation-specific information. RAIN was able to test the use of this metadata, ensuring it processes well, does not cause undue errors, and fulfills the needs of a federated ecosystem.

RAIN Live Oak successfully tested with the following vendors:

• Siemens
• CareEvolution
• MedAllies
• Oracle
• Verizon
• Athena Health
• Qvera
• Corepoint Health

The testing process was intensive and extended through the full week of the Connectathon event. The HPD specification was tested using a sequence of use case scenarios designed to demonstrate a wide range of searches likely to be needed in real-world usage. Test cases included: searching for organizations by ID, name and address; searching for individual providers by NPI, name, practice location, and specific organizational membership; and returning a list of providers who are members of a specific organization.

The successes at Connectathon 2015 demonstrate the viability of the HPD Federated Option and show how California and other states can move forward in deploying federation orchestrator to bring together all the state’s HISPs into a single searchable ecosystem, rapidly expanding use of electronic services and driving use of Direct to improve care and engage patients.

RAIN was invited by IHE and the ONC to demonstrate HPD at the upcoming HIMSS15 Interoperability Showcase in April.