The Future of Secure, Reliable Message Transport for Exchanging Health Information

The CDC PHINMS product has reached a milestone and is now a mature, deployed and successful product.  Since its inception in 2002 as a secure-reliable messaging service for NEDSS it has been consistently enhanced and extended to improve its functionality and ease of implementation.  PHINMS is now installed in well over 600 locations nationally in direct support of NEDSS, BioSense, the Laboratory Response Network and many other CDC and state-based surveillance programs.  PHINMS has proven to be a successful solution for what it was intended to perform.  And that, in simple terms, has been to provide a point-to-point, secure and encrypted data exchange between two “messaging partners” and to guarantee the delivery of each message, once and only once, from sender to receiver.  The ebXML standard on which PHINMS is built does however have its limitations and feedback from CDC’s partners confirms the need to think about different models for accomplishing the objectives of secure and reliable data exchanges in the health domain (public health and healthcare). 

 With the emergence of the grid as well as open source and service oriented architecture as potential visions for an interconnected health domain, new approaches are needed.  This session will explain NCPHI’s approach for going forward as well as seek feedback from the audience to determine business value for partners.