Jay Nakashima shares a note of gratitude and his confidence in eHealth Exchange’s future
After eight gratifying years leading eHealth Exchange, I’m stepping into semi-retirement, and I couldn’t be prouder of what our team has accomplished.
As I reflect on this chapter, one of the most important shifts we made was transitioning eHealth Exchange to a hub-and-spoke model to dramatically expand national exchange. The Hub is now the key component of the network for sharing health data—serving as a centralized gateway across participants and other networks. With this model, participants establish a single connection to the Hub for bi-directional exchange with any other network participant.
We expanded the scale and reach of the network in meaningful ways: modern, scalable connectivity to public health agencies nationwide, four new federal partners including the Food and Drug Administration, the Indian Health Service, the Coast Guard, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), 24 additional state and regional health information exchanges (HIEs), health payers across the country, and direct access for patients themselves. Few networks can claim that breadth of impact and progress over a relatively brief period of time.
Equally important, we strengthened a foundation of trust that may serve as the organization’s most enduring legacy. We never stored patient data, we never experienced a negative security event, and we never used patient data for secondary purposes. In an industry where trust is everything, we never wavered. That is the promise and commitment I am most proud of.
We joined Carequality, became the first Qualified Health Information Network® designated under the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement™, and earned multiple KLAS Research awards for real-world deployment of modern Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources® application programming interfaces. These milestones reflect not just technical progress, but sustained collaboration across a complex ecosystem. Today, the team is building on that same foundation—once again stepping up to meet the moment by working to fulfill our pledge to become a CMS-Aligned Network under the Health Tech Ecosystem initiative, advancing the next chapter of trusted, standards-based exchange at scale.
None of this happened alone.
To the eHealth Exchange team who performed the truly difficult, often invisible work of ensuring trusted interoperability, thank you.
To our federal agency partners who believed in this mission and built alongside us, thank you.
To the congressional staffers who helped to shape policy that made this network possible, thank you.
And to the volunteers who governed this network and kept it accountable to the patients it serves, thank you.
You are all appreciated.
Finally, I’m genuinely excited about what comes next under Doug Dietzman’s leadership. Doug brings deep experience in interoperability and health information exchange, having worked alongside hospital systems, physician organizations, HIEs, and payers throughout his career. Most recently, he helped lead interoperability initiatives at Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, an eHealth Exchange participant, and he has been actively engaged with our organization for years through service on our Coordinating Committee and, more recently, our Board of Directors. Together, those experiences have given him a deep understanding of our mission, our participants, and the opportunities ahead. Coupled with his fresh perspective and clear vision for the future, I am confident Doug will take eHealth Exchange to the next level of impact. It has been the honor of my career to lead this work, and I leave knowing the mission is in very capable hands.
