CAQH and EHNAC Partner to Provide Incentives for FHIR App Developers to Become Accredited

CAQH and the Electronic Healthcare Network Accreditation Commission (EHNAC) have partnered to provide incentives for application developers participating in the CAQH Endpoint Directory to become accredited through the Trusted Dynamic Registration and Authorization Accreditation Program (TDRAAP) from EHNAC and UDAP.org, publisher of the Unified Data Access Profiles. TDRAAP accreditation affirms an app’s technical and security credentials and gives health plans the confidence they need to connect and share member data.

“We are proud to be partnering with EHNAC to encourage healthcare organizations and app developers to become TDRAAP accredited,” said Robin Thomashauer, President of CAQH. “Our goal is to enhance the level of trust and transparency in the endpoints ecosystem so safe and reliable consumer apps can proliferate.”

The CMS final Interoperability and Patient Access rule issued last year requires CMS-regulated plans to enable consumers to access and transfer their healthcare information using a third-party app of their choice. Because there are already more than 300,000 possible plan and app connections, CAQH created a centralized directory to allow developers and plans to find and validate these endpoints so they may exchange member data.

TDRAAP is designed to help healthcare organizations and application developers demonstrate their ability to use trusted digital certificates for endpoint identity, registration, authentication and attribute discovery for electronic healthcare transactions in real-time.  The program is available with two options:

TDRAAP-Basic is designed for developers of consumer-facing apps using individual sign-on for access to one patient’s data at a time. TDRAAP-Comprehensive is designed for organizations wanting to demonstrate full HIPAA/HITECH Privacy and Security compliance and validation of all UDAP technical workflows that they support.

CAQH will identify those app developers that are TDRAAP accredited and the type of accreditation in the CAQH Endpoint Directory. To encourage app developers to achieve TDRAAP accreditation, CAQH and EHNAC are reducing the cost of accreditation to those developers that participate in the CAQH Endpoint Directory. 

“The ability to efficiently register and authenticate endpoints is a core component of healthcare interoperability,” said Lee Barrett, Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer of EHNAC. “This joint initiative by EHNAC and CAQH will ultimately result in consumers having greater access to their healthcare data and the goals of the CMS final rule being met.”