The Direct Project aims to replace mail and fax as the current standard of communication between providers and organizations. It has been adopted by ONC as a requirement in 2014 Edition Meaningful Use measures 170.314(b)(1) & (2) and (e)(1). “The Direct Project specifies a simple, secure, scalable, standards-based way for participants to send encrypted health information directly to known, trusted recipients over the internet.”
Reference implementations
The Reference Implementation Workgroup provides two out-of-the-box solutions for implementing Direct in your organization or extended as part of an EMR. The Reference Implementation, sometimes known as the Bare Metal, project consists of two projects, one based on C# and the other Java. They are both offered as installable products or as extendable open source. For this overview I will be discussing the C# version. The Reference Implementation Workgroup can be found on the Direct Wiki under the Reference Implementation.
Installing the C# Reference Implementation
Instructions for preparing a machine for Direct can be found here and instructions for installing the binaries are located here. If you are still new to the Direct Project, you are probably going to perform a “Developer Install”. This installs all of the components on a single machine, but more importantly it will provide you with two example domains preloaded with a trust anchors, certificates and email addresses.
The basic install procedure is mostly straightforward with one caveat. The Developer Gateway Install assumes you are using SqlExpress. My suggestion is to install SqlExpress for this purpose or contact DHIT for assistance.
