Notices of Operational Change

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Notice of Operational ChangeSent Date: April 2, 2020

Effective Dates/Time: 2020-04-02 09:00pm ET
Environment: PRODUCTION
Scope: eHealth Exchange Hub
Event Duration: This change will not require a service outage
Implementer Action Needed: Self-test as appropriate

The eHealth Exchange (eHx) Hub’s directory synchronization process has been enhanced to import additional administrator-managed Hub-related Participant attributes that were recently added to the eHx Participant Directory. These new attributes are used to inform the eHx Hub of routing decisions and require no additional configuration from participants.

The new attributes that have been added to the eHx Directory are:

Domain
New attribute that indicates if a given Organizational entity is a Carequality Implementer/Connection, an eHealth Exchange Participant/Sub-Participant, other, or a combination of any or all domains. This is needed for routing, billing, import, workflow, access control, and attribute aggregation purposes.

HubRoutingStatus
New attribute that indicates the routing status of the eHealth Exchange Participant through the eHx Hub.

eHxAdministrativeStatus
New attribute that indicates the administrative status of the eHealth Exchange Participant. Availability of this Organizational entry to be used for any eHealth Exchange transactions (not just via the Hub) is defined by this attribute.

HubServiceDescriptions
New attribute that indicates a given organization’s Hub subscriptions (i.e. “CarequalityService”).

These attributes are being maintained by eHx administrators, and will be available in the eHx Directory as read-only to Participants via the existing FHIR API.

Scope: This change is being applied to the eHx Hub PRODUCTION environment.

Impact: This change will have no direct impact to Participants nor their query-based exchange via the Hub. The change will merely move the source of truth of these values from within the Hub itself to the Directory.

Post Event Validation: After the changes are implemented, the eHx team will run a directory synchronization to confirm successful promotion. These changes have been deployed to the Validation environment with no negative impacts.

Rollback Plan: In the event Participants report significant issues after the changes that cannot be readily remediated, the changes may be reverted.

Support: Sequoia staff will be available for standard business hours support and will be monitoring the following email address for one hour after the event: administrator@ehealthexchange.org

REMINDER:

The eHx Hub team has implemented a recurring weekly maintenance window of Thursday evenings at 9:00pm ET for all scheduled (non-urgent) events. The duration of the maintenance events will be determined by the respective changes for each event, and details will be communicated out to all Participants at least 48 hours prior to the event. If there are no changes for any given week then the maintenance event will not occur.

Notice of Operational ChangeSent Date: January 18, 2019

Effective Dates: 2019-01-22 Carequality (DEV and STAGE) 2019-01-22 eHealth Exchange (VAL) 2019-02-01 Carequality (PROD) 2019-02-01 eHealth Exchange (PROD)
Effective Time: 17:00 Eastern Time on the respective date
Scope: Carequality and eHealth Exchange Directory clusters
Event Duration: Approximately 1 hour
Participant Action Needed: Self-determined

Description

To improve the performance of the Carequality Directory clusters (DEV, STAGE, and PROD), as well as the eHealth Exchange directory clusters (VAL and PROD), Sequoia plans to deploy a new version of the Sequoia Healthcare Directory server software that enables the use of compressed returned data.

The Carequality Directory has grown to the size where a query of all organizations results in an uncompressed response size of over 64MB of XML data (and more data for a JSON response). The response size will continue to grow as more organizations are added to the Carequality Directory.

Because the data being transmitted back from the Carequality servers is currently not compressed, the directory requires significant IO processing to build and transmit the response.

While the eHealth Exchange Directory is not as large as the Carequality Directory, we can foresee how there might be performance degradation as it continues to grow and return uncompressed data.

Because of the above, Sequoia will be upgrading the Carequality and eHealth Exchange servers to compress responses when a client request contains the Accept-Encoding=gzip HTTP request header.

To leverage this capability, and to avoid the previously mentioned performance issues, your organization should ensure your directory client requests contain the Accept-Encoding=gzip HTTP request header.

Please advise us by January 21st if your organization would like to delay these changes.

eHealth Exchange PRODUCTION (PROD) Healthcare DirectorySent Date: January 8, 2019

Effective Date: 2019-01-10
Effective Time: 17:00 Eastern Time
Scope: eHealth Exchange DNS Changes
Event Duration: Approximately 1 hour for DNS changes and 1 to 3 days for propagation of the updates Implementer Action Needed: Self-determined

You will continue to access this service as you currently do (the end points, base URL and API keys will remain the same). If your directory access client includes the Accept-Encoding=gzip header in your requests, you should see immediate performance (response time and size) improvements. If your directory access client does not set the Accept-Encoding=gzip header in your requests, you will continue to experience the current performance.

Impact: Each client implementation should be self-assessed to determine the impact.

Scope: The scope of these changes is limited to modification of the Carequality and eHealth Exchange servers to compress responses when client request have the Accept-Encoding=gzip header. There will be no other functionality changes.

Data Consistency: These changes do not affect any Directory data.

API Keys: These changes do not affect any API Keys. All prior API Keys will continue to work as they currently are.

Post Event Validation: We suggest that your organization validates access to the Carequality Development, Stage, and Production, and the eHealth Exchange Validation and Production environments as per your standard procedures (depending on which Directory your organization is a participant of).

Support: Sequoia staff will be available for standard business hours support.

DESCRIPTION

Sequoia will be adding Sender Policy Framework (SPF) entries into our DNS records to reflect our enhanced infrastructure. Adding these SPF entries will provide an extra layer of authentication, making it harder to email spoof, a technique often used in phishing and email spam.

Please advise us by January 10th if your organization would like to delay these changes.

Support: Sequoia staff will be available for standard business hours support.

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