What You Should Know:
– DirectTrust today announced it has acquired the assets of SAFE Identity (including Trust Framework), an industry consortium and certification body supporting identity assurance and cryptography in healthcare. Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed.
– The acquisition substantially extends DirectTrust’s capabilities and services and is expected to enable new and expanded interoperability use cases.
Post-Acquisition Plans
As part of the acquisition, DirectTrust has created DirectTrust Identity, a new division, to house the SAFE Trust Framework. New and current members of both organizations will be able to rely on DirectTrust to manage policies and infrastructure supporting a community that issues secure and identity-assured credentials for electronic transactions in healthcare. SAFE Policy Management Authority (PMA) members will participate as members of DirectTrust Identity, which will operate the SAFE infrastructure used by multiple large pharmaceutical companies to securely interact with federal agencies (in accordance with 21 CFR Part 11) and business partners in the US and globally.
“Our acquisition of SAFE Identity’s assets is truly a groundbreaking moment for DirectTrust and the entire electronic healthcare information industry,” said Scott Stuewe, President and CEO of DirectTrust. “SAFE Identity and DirectTrust are like-minded organizations with memberships that share common goals. Since our inception, DirectTrust has focused on instilling trust in electronic health communication with the goal of improving health for individuals and populations. Both the DirectTrust and SAFE Identity trust framework communities seek to enable safe and secure transactions through the use of identity-assured credentials backed by public key infrastructure and consensus-based policies.”
Stuewe continued, “Further, the newly expanded DirectTrust ecosystem will extend the breadth of healthcare stakeholders it serves and enable additional capabilities, as well as exciting new use cases where the two groups of stakeholders connect. For example, members will be able to interact with federal agencies for signing documents and authenticating to systems. Potential new use cases could include universally trusted healthcare credentials for consumers; identity assurance and security for the pharmaceutical supply chain (DSCSA), possibly all the way to clinical pharmacy; as well as medical device security and identification.”
DirectTrust Background
DirectTrust is a non-profit healthcare industry alliance that supports secure, identity-verified electronic exchanges of protected health information (PHI) between provider organizations, and between providers and patients, for the purpose of improved coordination of care. DirectTrust serves as a governance forum, trust community, standards organization, and accreditation body for persons and entities engaged in exchange utilizing the Direct Standard™, supported by DirectTrust’s robust security and trust framework.
