The Council for Affordable Quality Healthcare (CAQH), a nonprofit alliance of health plans that seeks to simplify administration for payers and providers and enable better care for patients, has announced a partnership with VeriSign, Inc., the Mountain View, Calif. network infrastructure company.

The two of them will launch a pilot program that aims to demonstrate a secure data exchange that could be a model for national health IT interoperability.

Building upon initial operating rules laid out by CAQH's Committee on Operating Rules for Information Exchange (CORE), the six-month project will stipulate the use of digital certificates to access patient data. CORE will use the VeriSign Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) to create a prototype community that identifies best practices and tests data encryption operating rules to safely transmit patient administrative information between providers, payers and healthcare vendors.

"We saw VeriSign as an ideal partner to look at some of the policies and procedures that the industry could follow to ensure that, as we use the different levels of authentication, we use them in manner that learns lessons from other industries" – such as the financial and telecom industries – "and we do things that are going to work and be adopted," said Gwen Lohse, deputy director for CAQH. "We're not going to do everything overnight, but we really believe that we can learn from this pilot and see what's appropriate to put in the next few phases of CORE."

The pilot will be used to help develop industry operating rules on approaches to secure and authenticate transactions among payers, providers, and patients; protecting physician and patient identities; maximizing transaction privacy and security; and reducing the cost and complexity of secure data exchange.

Besides providers such as Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and fellow vendor members of the New England Healthcare Exchange Network (NEHEN), participants in the project include CORE-certified payers such as Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, WellPoint and Aetna that, among them, cover more than 75 percent of the commercially insured in the United States.

"As a CORE-certified plan and founding member of the New England Healthcare Exchange Network (NEHEN), Harvard Pilgrim has a long-standing, active interest in streamlining the exchange of information between health plans and providers," said John Kelly, director of eBusiness Architecture at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care. "By leveraging the collaborative successes to date by payers and providers, this pilot program will be invaluable in demonstrating how to systematically incorporate authentication into healthcare in the most efficient and secure manner."

Use of authenticated digital certificates – a technology, Lohse notes that the industry at large is "really starting to embrace" – helps ensure that patient administrative data is only shared between legitimate and authorized parties.

With more than 700,000 physicians and 185 million consumers expected to exchange sensitive health information online in the coming years, the aim, ultimately, is to help show the way forward to an electronically interconnected healthcare industry where patients can receive better care while feeling secure about the safe transfer of their personal data.

"For us, it really comes down to a fundamental issue of trust," said Jeff Barnett, director of healthcare solutions at VeriSign. "It's about creating a trusted community within the industry, to securely exchange administrative data. We see CAQH as a logical partner to help do this, and to be able to provide a model that really provides that, but also something that could be scaled up to be adoptable nationwide.