Electronic Health Reporter

The National Association for Trusted Exchange (NATE) announces that the new NATE Blue Button for Consumers (NBB4C) Trust Bundle officially is live. Inaugural participants in the NBB4C Trust Community include some of the most widely used consumer health applications, including:

• Get Real Health InstantPHR
• Humetrix iBlueButton
• iShare Medical
• Medyear
• Microsoft HealthVault
• NoMoreClipboard

The NBB4C Trust Bundle contains trust anchors of consumer-facing applications (CFAs) that utilize Direct secure messaging to securely move data from one application to another. The common set of eligibility criteria that make up the trust framework of the NBB4C helps relying parties to identify CFAs that meet or exceed these obligations, while allowing patients to make choices from a growing pool of CFAs that best fit their personal needs. The net result is that providers can confidently share health information with their patient via a CFA of their choice.

“The participants onboarded to the NATE Blue Button for Consumers (NBB4C) Trust Bundle include consumer controlled applications that have been in use for years across the country and others who are bringing new offerings to the market with distinct differentiators.  Our ambition for the NBB4C is to provide a mechanism that facilitates providers being able to more easily share health information with their patient population, capitalizing on their existing investment in EMRs that use Direct today,” said Aaron Seib, NATE CEO.  “It is our hope that the NBB4C will pave the way for a diverse community of consumer facing applications that patients can choose from to access and manage their health information directly. This kind of patient engagement will have a positive impact on care individually and on our healthcare system as a whole.”

NATE expects participation in the NBB4C Trust Bundle to grow rapidly.  To accommodate this growth, they are announcing the release of a new tool to facilitate onboarding and to publish bundles for relying parties that wish to adopt them as part of their patient engagement activities.  The NATE Bundle Administrator (NBA) serves as a secure portal for downloading trust anchors for use in a relying party’s trust store as well as for uploading documentation related to onboarding to the NBB4C.  Interested CFAs may now submit their NBB4C Onboarding Applications using the NBA.  Applications are available for download at http://nate-trust.org/trustbundles.

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About National Association for Trusted Exchange

The National Association for Trusted Exchange (NATE) brings the expertise of its membership and other stakeholders together to find common solutions that optimize the appropriate exchange of health information for greater gains in adoption and outcomes. Emerging from the Western States Consortium, a pilot project supported by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), NATE was established as a not-for-profit organization in May 2013. Consistent with NATE’s mission to address the legal, policy, and technical barriers that inhibit health information exchange between entities within a state and across states, NATE leads and participates in a number of ongoing and emerging projects in the HIE domain. NATE has been operating its own Trust Bundles in production since November 2012 and recently took over administration of the Blue Button Consumer Trust Bundles.  Working with a broad set of stakeholders through multiple task forces, crowdsourcing and a call for public comment, NATE is proud to make available the first release of NATE’s Blue Button for Consumers (NBB4C) Trust Bundle beginning in 2015.  NATE will soon move into a new phase of development around Blue Button Trust Bundles.  Stakeholders interested in participating in the next phase of NATE’s work in consumer-mediated exchange should consider NATE membership or subscribe to news from NATE’s PHR Community.