The Office of the National Coordinator for Healthcare Information Technology (ONC) announced the Direct Protocol as an ‘interoperability’ solution for the secure exchange of healthcare data. New Jersey based MaxMD’s products resolve security and interoperability challenges faced by EMR vendors, HIEs, new and legacy healthcare Information systems as well as healthcare coordinators. The exchange of protected health information (PHI) between healthcare organizations and the federal government (VA, DOD, CMS, and Indian Health Services) requires standardized encryption techniques to ensure safe conveyance of documents. “We securely transport data using a nationally standardized protocol and we can also make data contained in a C-CDA, or any other payload, actionable in any care setting in a fast and cost efficient manner,” says Scott A. Finlay, CEO MaxMD. Finlay reassures that MaxMD is overcoming interoperability challenges by focusing on security, policy and scalable HIE concepts that leverage the Direct Protocol’s “payload agnostic” and “one-to-many” exchange features.

MaxMD serves a national client base and provides easily accessible tools and services that can be quickly incorporated or interfaced with virtually any existing Healthcare Information Technology application or system. “At MaxMD we are focused on interoperability solutions and creating sustainable and scalable solutions for all constituencies in the healthcare space,” says Finlay. MaxMD’s Direct mdEmail® was developed as a standalone solution for those healthcare organizations that do not have an EMR (Electronic Medical Re¬cord) but need to coordinate care or share PHI with other healthcare organizations via Direct, a fast growing interoperability protocol. Direct md Email® can be white labeled by resellers or other Healthcare IT vendors and natively populates the National Direct Trust Directory in an address book to ease coordination.“All of our solutions may be accessed from virtually any type of device such as tablets, PC, or smart phones or they can be incorporated into other applications via robust APIs,” says Finlay. The company’s digital signature product MaxSignatures™ also integrates seamlessly with the direct md Email® product to leverage and increase the utility of the Direct Protocol, improving care coordination between trusted end points. “We developed MaxSignatures™, to address virtually any signing scenario and ensure provenance of data.

MaxSignatures™ can be integrated into any other application via an API and will be essential for data submissions to the Federal Agencies,” says Finlay.

The firm’s EAAS® (Encryption as a Service) approach enables new and legacy systems to incorporate Direct Secure Messaging in a fast, capital efficient manner. The Direct Protocol specifies several Standard edge protocols to ease the burden of regulatory compliance on application service providers, technology applications or end users of Direct Secure Messaging. MaxMD supports all of these standard edge protocols. Through robust APIs MaxMD provides interfaces to any HIT application for HISP (Health Information Service Provider), Registration Authority and Certificate Authority services.

To stand out among the competitive players in the market, the company remains heavily involved in Direct Trust work groups. This enables the firm to influence and stay ahead of current and emerging security, technology and policy requirements. “We believe our unique products such as Natural Language Processing (MaxNLP™), “trusted” phone-based messaging (DirecText™), data translation (HealtheMax™), and MaxSignatures™ optimize and widen the use cases of the Direct Protocol and best position our customers for the future of Health Information Exchange,” says Finlay. “What is common to all our products and our approach is a focus on scalable, sustainable and lightweight (“plug and play”) solutions that offer clients reasonable economic decisions and the ability to quickly add capabilities in a modular fashion”