The New Jersey Health Information Technology Extension Center (NJ-HITEC) will be providing its members with the Direct Project capabilities, which allows provider to securely exchange health information over the internet.

To implement the Direct Project initiative product, NJ-HITEC is using MaxMD (Fort Lee, N.J.) for its vendor. MaxMD says its Direct Project product has been accreditedwith the Direct Trusted Agent Accreditation Program (DTAAP) for HISP, CA and RA from DirectTrust.org and the Electronic Healthcare Network Accreditation Commission (EHNAC).

NJ-HITEC Executive Director, Bill O'Byrne, stated: "Meaningful Use Stage 2 requires that all professional and institutional providers be able to send and receive patient health information that meets the national privacy and security standards. Direct protocols are defined in the regulation as an acceptable transport mechanism for secure interoperable exchanges. To assist our member providers meet these requirements, NJ-HITEC has formed an alliance with MaxMD to offer these services in our private and secure Member Portal. This will further ensure that NJ-HITEC providers have access to all the elements necessary to be Meaningful Users." 

NJ-HITEC is just the latest organization to offer Direct to its members. The East Tennessee Health Information Network (etHIN) recently announced it was implementing a solution to enable secure direct provider-to-provider messaging exchange of electronic health information. As mentioned by O’Byrne, it’s a requirement of Stage 2 of Meaningful Use to be able to securely send and receive patient health information to other providers.