RESTful Health Exchange

I have been involved in a new S&I-affiliated initiative called RESTful Health Exchange (RHEx), which will test application of the REST-style (Representational State Transfer) architecture to health information exchange. REST is a popular approach of accessing and managing remote resources on the Internet that relies on a stateless, client-server, cacheable communications protocol. RHEx is attempting to develop specifications for secure RESTful transport for healthcare exchange to be used in conjunction with SOAP and SMTP currently being used in Exchange and Direct.

RHEx is billed as a open-source, exploratory project to pilot proven web technologies that support simple, secure, standards-based health information exchange. RHEx continues the government 2.0 tradition of federal partner investment to find innovative solutions to their health IT needs and share the results of their investment with the entire health IT community...