As part of the ARRA award to the State of Tennessee’s Office of eHealth Initiatives, one of the objectives of the State Health Information Exchange strategy is to create the necessary infrastructure to help in the adoption of Direct technology across the entire spectrum of healthcare professionals. The plan is to provide Direct Health Internet Services and Direct Health Identity Services.
The State of Tennessee is exploring a market-based Direct approach where the State would define the Health Information Service Providers (HISP) certification criteria and where the State would work with a nonprofit third party entity to help providers adopt Direct technology.
The State envisions that HISPs may be responsible for registration authority, certificate authority, help desk, password recovery, provisioning and de-provisioning of users, trouble shooting of help tickets, and for signing participation agreements for services between customer and service providers.
The State in seeking guidance from the vendor community on August 13, 2012 released a Request for Information (RFI) to find the best way to establish a minimum set of requirements for HISP certification.
Vendor responses will be reviewed for planning purposes. The State is particularly interested in analyzing various HISP services, and software, and infrastructure options. The State wants to understand the marketplace in terms of industry capabilities, innovative delivery approaches, and performance strategies and measures.
Go to http://tn.gov/generalserv/purchasing/ocr/documents/RFI31865-0510.pdf to view RFI (31865-00510) due September 7, 2012. For questions, email Eric Harkness at Eric.Harkness@tn.gov.
