DirectTrust’s 10th Anniversary

We’re Celebrating!

It’s our 10th anniversary! DirectTrust was founded on April 5, 2012 and while we’ve both grown and evolved over the past decade, our commitment to trusted exchange, trust-in-identity, and our community is the same.  We hope you’ll join us in celebrating 10 years of progress!

Find celebration resources on this page.  As part of the celebration, we encourage you to educate your own customers and community about Direct.  Cheers to 10 years!

Join in!

Access celebration resources and join in the fun!

Community Well Wishes

President Ronald Reagan famously said, “Trust, but verify.” It turns out that sub-second verification, across a very large number of participants, is quite tricky. Today, every Direct Secure Messaging participant can send messages to any other participant and feel confident that the message will get there. And, every receiver of these messages knows that they are not being spammed, scammed, or slammed. DirectTrust has (uniquely) enabled the entire healthcare industry to do peer-to-peer messaging. Amazing!

Happy birthday, DirectTrust! It’s been inspiring to see your continued growth and evolution, from Direct Secure Messaging to trust networks and now identity — all in service of advancing interoperability and growing Team Interop! Here’s to many more years of partnership.

DirectTrust is a healthcare equalizer, creating an affordable foundation for trusted data exchange.

Congratulations DirectTrust. Ten years is a huge milestone! Coming out of meaningful use as a concept to the creation of a vast HISP network managing millions of entries in the national directory and almost three billion messages transacted is a huge accomplishment. Can’t wait to see what the next ten years bring

Jon Elwell, Kno2

Congratulations DirectTrust on your 10-year anniversary. In some ways it seems like only yesterday we were meeting in a hotel in Chicago to create the concept of Direct messaging, which then led to DirectTrust. On the other hand, to go from nothing to the most deployed, accepted and trusted interoperability capability in healthcare anywhere in the world is quite and accomplishment. One that occasionally seems like it is taken for granted. I think that over the next ten years, DirectTrust will continue to bring together technologies in innovative ways to not only address interoperability, but to address the fundamental problems of identity and trust among consumers, patients, providers, payers and researchers. Cheers to the last ten years in anticipation of the next ten.

Dan Soule, Health Catalyst

Congratulations to DirectTrust on their 10th Anniversary! We have a fantastic working relationship dating back to 2011, and worked together to develop and administer the CA, RA and HISP accreditation programs. We have excellent rapport and enjoy working with the DirectTrust members on their EHNAC accreditations and HITRUST certifications. We look forward to our continued partnership and to build upon the success that Direct as a standard has achieved. Congratulations on this momentous milestone!

Debra Hopkinson, EHNAC

Congratulations to DirectTrust on its 10th Anniversary! EHNAC has been fortunate to have had a strong partnership with DirectTrust since its inception. We jointly developed the CA, RA and HISP accreditation programs, administered them, have worked together on their evolution, have established excellent relationships with many DirectTrust members, and we have evolved to have a broad-based partnership as well today in providing value-add services to the members. We have appreciated and valued our partnership with the DirectTrust leadership, board, technical committees, and members. We look forward to our continued partnership and demonstrating stakeholder trust for the healthcare ecosystem and continuing to build upon the success that Direct as a standard has provided, the excellent key performance metrics on adoption and the reputation for excellence. Congratulations on this important milestone, and our toast to the future for continued success and growth!

Lee Barrett, EHNAC

Direct went outside the box to allow us to connect and send messages securely to anybody with a Direct e-mail address, directly. It has thereby demonstrated what it can do within, across, and outside a network. What better tool to complement networks could we have asked for? Congrats and thank you to all who made that happen! Now let’s keep on using it and make it even better.

Hans Buitendijk, Cerner

Direct messaging began over 12 years ago when an old server under my desk swapped messages with Greg Meyer’s laptop. I am blown away by the continuing adoption, resilience and impact of Direct – developed by a community of believers who came together, volunteers who created and ratified the standard, wrote the code, integrated and evangelized it into their systems! After 30+ years in the software business, the creation of Direct is what I am personally most proud of!

It has been amazing to see the growth of Direct Secure Messaging in the marketplace over the last few years and DirectTrust, as the custodian of the Direct standard, is doing a fantastic job! The workgroups, educational, and promotional opportunities offered by DirectTrust engage the community and facilitate the stakeholder collaboration needed to advance industry interoperability. DirectTrust is helping the health IT community make a real difference in healthcare!

From its founding, DirectTrust has been making a difference in how we approach interoperability as an industry. There was no better example of this than the significant role Direct has played in delivering critical information, like case and immunization data to providers and public health organizations.

Justin McMartin, Surescripts

The work that DirectTrust has done over the past decade continues to highlight the importance of trusted exchange — it’s at the heart of making true interoperability work. Without trust, clinical data exchange at scale ceases to exist. I’ve also been impressed with DirectTrust’s commitment to standards, as an ANSI-accredited standards development body, and their work to promote the Direct standard, event notifications, and the launch of their latest consensus body on patient identity. It’s so important for the interoperability community to rally around a standards-based approach to all that we do in order to continue to expand and optimize how we exchange data in a meaningful way, with the ultimate goal of improving patient outcomes.

Congratulations to DirectTrust on your 10th Anniversary! It has been a privilege to be associated with and to watch the growth and success of the organization over the years.

Since 2012 DirectTrust has been instrumental in helping the health care community exchange data in a simple, scalable, and secure manner. As a longstanding DirectTrust member, we wish to extend our heartfelt congratulations on reaching your 10-year anniversary. We look forward to many more years of working together, making health data connectivity a reality.

Bob Janacek, DataMotion

Celebrating Our History

“From a table napkin drawing to a national network”

We’re proud to introduce this new video sharing the origins of Direct and DirectTrust.  Through a series of interviews, we captures the stories, memories, and milestones significant to the formation of DirectTrust.  While we may be celebrating our 10 year anniversary as DirectTrust, our roots take us back to 2009 as the idea for push interoperability first began to be investigated.

Watch this video to learn more from some of the many influential people to our formation.

ONC announces the Direct Project

The Direct Project: Simpler Provider Communication

Members share “Why DirectTrust” at the 2019 DirectTrust Summit

DirectTrust incorporates the assets of SAFE Identity

Community Creative Corner

Join in the Celebration

Get your Gear!

Represent the DirectTrust community by purchasing gear from the link below.

Get Involved!

Join us online for a virtual celebration on April 5th
Members, join us on April 5th at 2 ET/11 PT for our “Cheers to 10 Years” virtual celebration with giveaways and a community picture – make sure to wear DirectTrust gear or green! See your Member newsletter or reach out to us for an invite.

Submit your Success Story or Use Case
We’re always looking to celebrate the success of our community, as well as highlight ever-evolving and strengthening Use Cases.  Share your story with us for part of our promotion and advocacy of Direct Secure Messaging through updating communications materials, our website, and social media spotlights.

Educate your clients and partners
One of the largest gaps in the health industry remains around education of available interoperability opportunities and benefits.  Use our developed resources (members, reach out about cobranding opportunities) or create your own (explainers, blog posts, webinars/videos etc.) to share the benefits of Direct and how you fit in!

Get Social
Follow us to stay up to date on the latest and greatest! Make sure you follow DirectTrust on LinkedIn and Twitter for the most timely and relevant content!  Subscribe to our YouTube channel for new spotlight interviews and video content, and to our Newsletter to get a digest of the news relevant to you.

Share Educational Resources!

A Walk Down Memory Lane…

Resources on Direct

Check out our recent Metrics