Western States Consortium (WSC) Pilot of Direct Connect between California & Oregon

John Rancourt | HealthIT Buzz | September 6, 2013

Health care providers in California and Oregon are now querying each others’ provider directories and sending interstate Direct messages as a result of the Western States Consortium project. The Consortium’s final report, released today, details how the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) collaborated with 13 states to successfully test ways to break down technical and policy barriers to interstate exchange.

This is one example of how the Department of Health & Human Services is encouraging interoperability across states’ electronic information infrastructures, as described in the recently released Principles and Strategy for Accelerating Health Information Exchange...

...The success of this pilot led several of the states involved to form a not-for-profit named the National Association for Trusted Exchange. Commonly known as NATE, the organization continues to support multi-state initiatives and convene member states and others to better collaborate on health information exchange. “The WSC Pilot was successful on many fronts,” explains Aaron Seib, NATE’s CEO. ”Perhaps the most important being the demonstration that many states could collaborate together to establish solutions that satisfied a diverse set of policy variances.”...