The Old State Earns Website Design Award for Work with Dallas Arboretum

Dallas, TX (PRWEB) September 11, 2014

The Old State announced today that the full-service digital marketing website design agency was awarded the Best Cultural Digital Signage from the Digital Screenmedia Association. Company officials say the award was provided in recognition of The Old State’s installation of touch screen kiosks in the highly regarded new Rory Meyers Children’s Adventure Garden at the Dallas Arboretum. The educational kiosk project is one of the largest installs of its kind in the country – boasting some 980 interactive touch-screen games on over 120 outdoor screens. The Old State also recently designed and developed the Dallas Arboretum’s website.

“This is a bold new step for The Old State,” said Travis McElroy, Owner and CEO of The Old State. “We reached for the brass ring on this project and it really paid off.”

“Nothing like this has been done before on this scale that I know of,” says Ron LeonGuerrero, Director of Technology at The Old State. “Our entire team came together and did a superb job in a very short amount of time. I’m very proud of all of them.”

The award, coming on the heels of a Gold Award from the Council for Advancement and Support of Education for Texas Christian University’s Admissions website, is the second commendation that the company has received this year.

With new clients such as Klyde Warren Park in Dallas, and Great Parks of Hamilton County in Ohio, The Old State is emerging as the go-to company for outdoor kiosk design, development, and installation.

About The Old State:

The state of your brand is our business. We build cohesive websites, beautiful branding and print collateral, powerful applications, and our own web-based products to make your business as visible and profitable as possible. We turn clutter into clarity, problems into solutions and ideas into reality.

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DirectTrust Surpasses ONCs Secure HIE Specs, Earns Renewal

Washington, D.C. (PRWEB) April 08, 2014

DirectTrust, a non-profit trade alliance that advances secure, health information exchange via the Direct Protocol, announced today that its Cooperative Agreement with the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) for Health IT has been renewed for a second full year. The renewal came after DirectTrust not only met, but exceeded the goals of the ONC’s Exemplar HIE Governance Program.

“This is a time when identity theft and privacy concerns are prevalent, so securing patients’ personal health information in Direct messages – and trusting the identity between senders – is a must,” DirectTrust President and CEO David C. Kibbe, MD, said. “In a remarkably short period of time, our members have created a national network for secure and trusted health data exchange over the Internet. EHR users in hospitals, medical practices, and other health care facilities, as well as their patients, will all benefit from the ability to move data securely across organizational and IT boundaries via Direct. The work has been done on time, and on target.”

DirectTrust sets policies and standards for secure health information exchange and operates a voluntary, accreditation program for Health Information Services Providers (HISPs) in partnership with the Electronic Healthcare Network Accreditation Commission (EHNAC). Accredited HISPs provide trusted, low-cost message exchanges from within EHRs, web portals, and other applications for the purposes of health care coordination and patient engagement.

To qualify for renewal, DirectTrust had to meet a number of deadlines and milestones for growth of its trust community. One of those involved their Electronic Healthcare Network Accreditation Commission (EHNAC)-DirectTrust program. Accredited HISPs share digital certificates with one another, making it transparent and efficient for Direct relying parties to know who to trust, without having to engage in one-off contracts or single-use connections.

In all to date, DirectTrust has enrolled 49 organizations – including leading EHR companies, connectivity vendors, and state HIEs – in more than 80 accreditation and audit programs encompassing privacy, security, and trust-in-identity controls. That far exceeded the goal of 50 programs set for the first year of the Cooperative Agreement.

“Over the past year, DirectTrust worked hard to promote good governance practices and enable the exchange of health information,” said Kory Mertz, the Challenge Grant Director at the ONC. “We expect that in the second year of the contract, DirectTrust will continue this success and help to enable HISP-to-HISP interoperability among their participants.”

According to John Blair, MD, Chair of the DirectTrust Board of Directors and CEO of MedAllies, an accredited HISP, “The country has placed a high priority on digitizing providers throughout the health care industry. For the last several years, significant money and effort has gone into moving providers from paper to EHRs. Direct exchange is our greatest hope to create interoperability between these disparate EHR systems for transitions of care and care coordination. The partnership between DirectTrust and ONC has been a very productive collaboration between the private sector and government, something we don’t see every day.”

Details on the benefits of HIPAA-compliant messaging and EHNAC-DirectTrust accreditation can be found at http://www.DirectTrust.org.

About DirectTrust

DirectTrust is a nonprofit, competitively neutral, self-regulatory entity created by and for participants in the Direct community – including health information service providers (HISPs), certificate authorities, registration authorities, doctors, patients, and vendors. It supports both provider-to-provider, as well as patient-to-provider Direct exchange. The goal of DirectTrust is to develop, promote and, as necessary, help enforce the rules and best practices needed to maintain security and trust within the Direct network, consistent with the HITECH Act and the governance rules for the NwHIN established by the ONC. DirectTrust is committed to fostering widespread public confidence in the Direct exchange of health information. To learn more, please visit http://www.DirectTrust.org.

About the ONC Exemplar HIE Governance Program

The Exemplar Health Information Exchange Governance Program funds cooperative agreements that advance the efforts of existing governance entities that benefit consumers and healthcare providers by allowing health information to flow securely between unaffiliated healthcare organizations. Ultimately, this aligns interoperability requirements and business practices with national priorities; overcomes interoperability challenges; reduces implementation costs; and assures the privacy and security of health information exchange.