To help celebrate 10 years of DirectTrust, we asked our friends in the industry to send us some thoughts on our legacy, the role we’ve played in their own work, and any other fond memories or special shout-outs. Thank you to everyone who submitted a quote!

Lisa Bari, Civitas Networks for Health

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.

Lee Barrett, Executive Director and CEO, 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!

Liz Buckle, Director of Product, CommonWell Health Alliance

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.

Hans Buitendijk, Cerner

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.

Jon Elwell, CEO, Kno2

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.

Patrick Hobson, Director of Marketing, Secure Exchange Solutions

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!

Debra Hopkinson, COO, EHNAC

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!

Bob Janacek, CEO and Co-founder, DataMotion

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.

Daniel Kazzaz, Advisory Board Member, Centauri Health Solutions | Co-founder, Secure Exchange Solutions

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!

Katherine Lusk, Texas Health Services Authority

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

Umesh Madan, Microsoft Corporation

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!

Justin McMartin, Product Management Manager, Surescripts

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.

Dan Paoletti, The Ohio Health Information Partnership

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.

Dan Soule, Board Chair of DirectTrust | Health Catalyst

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.