CAQH and EHNAC Partner to Provide Incentives for FHIR App Developers to Become Accredited

TDRAAP accreditation program paves the way for apps and plans to connect and for consumers to gain greater access to their healthcare data

CAQH (@CAQH) and the Electronic Healthcare Network Accreditation Commission (EHNAC) (@EHNAC) have partnered to provide incentives for application developers participating in the CAQH Endpoint Directory to become accredited through the Trusted Dynamic Registration and Authorization Accreditation Program (TDRAAP) from EHNAC and UDAP.org, publisher of the Unified Data Access Profiles. TDRAAP accreditation affirms an app’s technical and security credentials and gives health plans the confidence they need to connect and share member data.

“We are proud to be partnering with EHNAC to encourage healthcare organizations and app developers to become TDRAAP accredited,” said Robin Thomashauer, President of CAQH. “Our goal is to enhance the level of trust and transparency in the endpoints ecosystem so safe and reliable consumer apps can proliferate.”

The CMS final Interoperability and Patient Access rule issued last year requires CMS-regulated plans to enable consumers to access and transfer their healthcare information using a third-party app of their choice. Because there are already more than 300,000 possible plan and app connections, CAQH created a centralized directory to allow developers and plans to find and validate these endpoints so they may exchange member data.

TDRAAP is designed to help healthcare organizations and application developers demonstrate their ability to use trusted digital certificates for endpoint identity, registration, authentication and attribute discovery for electronic healthcare transactions in real-time. The program is available with two options: TDRAAP-Basic is designed for developers of consumer-facing apps using individual sign-on for access to one patient’s data at a time. TDRAAP-Comprehensive is designed for organizations wanting to demonstrate full HIPAA/HITECH Privacy and Security compliance and validation of all UDAP technical workflows that they support.

CAQH will identify those app developers that are TDRAAP accredited and the type of accreditation in the CAQH Endpoint Directory. To encourage app developers to achieve TDRAAP accreditation, CAQH and EHNAC are reducing the cost of accreditation to those developers that participate in the CAQH Endpoint Directory.

“The ability to efficiently register and authenticate endpoints is a core component of healthcare interoperability,” said Lee Barrett, Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer of EHNAC. “This joint initiative by EHNAC and CAQH will ultimately result in consumers having greater access to their healthcare data and the goals of the CMS final rule being met.”

About CAQH
For more than 20 years, CAQH has helped nearly 1,000 health plans, 1.6 million providers, government entities and vendors connect, exchange information and operate more efficiently. CAQH technology-enabled solutions and its Committee on Operating Rules for Information Exchange (CORE) bring the healthcare industry together to make sharing business information more automated, predictable and consistent. CAQH Explorations researches opportunities to reduce the burden of manual processes in healthcare administration.

About EHNAC
The Electronic Healthcare Network Accreditation Commission (EHNAC) is a voluntary, self-governing standards development organization (SDO) established to develop standard criteria and accredit organizations that electronically exchange healthcare data. These entities include accountable care organizations, data registries, electronic health networks, EPCS vendors, e-prescribing solution providers, financial services firms, health information exchanges, health information service providers, management service organizations, medical billers, outsourced service providers, payers, practice management system vendors, third-party administrators and trusted networks. The Commission is an authorized HITRUST External Assessor, making it the only organization able to provide both EHNAC accreditation as well as to conduct HITRUST CSF assessment services.

EHNAC was founded in 1993 and is a tax-exempt 501(c)(6) nonprofit organization. Guided by peer evaluation, the EHNAC accreditation process promotes quality service, innovation, cooperation and open competition in healthcare.