Non-profit alliance of health plans and trade associations CAQH and internet infrastructure services provider VeriSign have teamed up to conduct a pilot program that aims to prove that secure authentication is a “sine qua non” to the national agenda for health IT interoperability.
 

The six-month pilot will build upon a series of operating rules initiated by the CAQH committee on Operating Rules for Information Exchange (CORE). The CORE will use Verisign’s Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) to create a prototype community, whose aim is to detect best practices and test data encryption operating rules, enabling a transmission of patient administrative information.

The emergent pilot results will contribute to the development of further industry operating rules. Such regulations are meant to enable authenticated transactions among payers, providers and patients, protect physician and patient identities, maximize transaction privacy and security as well as reduce the cost and complexity of secure data exchange.

Participants embracing this pilot include Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, CORE-certified health plans Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, provider and vendor members of the New England Healthcare Exchange Network as well as PKI vendor-partners of the main participating organizations.