Ok, now I recall what I was thinking with "Transport Agent "... this would essentially be the identification of the entity functioning as the Interchange Receiver's "front door"... analogous to my "incoming mail server" for email. Everyone will have to designate one or more "front doors" or "in-boxes" for stuff to get to them, whether or not they employ a "Business Agent" as defined in HIPAA.
In one "little provider" scenario, we considered the doctor's software vendor acting as his Inbox-agent (prompting me to invent the term "transport agent"). But the world doesn't really care if they are sending stuff to the doctor's PC or to a computer in his vendor's office... so we may not need a term for the inbox-agent... just for the inbox. Tieing this back to Peter's comments about the unfairness of senders leaving stuff in receiver-designated sections of their own "out-boxes"... and thereby considering it "sent"... I think the fairness issue really depends on the wishes of the receiver. Using the email example, I DO have to poll my ISP's mail server to see if anything came in for me. The reason I agree this "pull" model is that I don't want the headaches of maintaining my own 24/7 incoming mail server. So if I don't want to maintain my own incoming EDI-message server (that has an address that the world is able to discover and understand) then I will have to elect a "transport agent" to do it for me. But if don't want to do that either... I can still play with the big boys by asking them to create a little mailbox space for me in their outbox... and I have my staff check it regularly. This would probably have the lowest transaction cost for the doctor. So I envision a Lilliputian Provider (can we just call them LPs?) having several types of "inboxes/agents": direct (ancient dialup modem) connections, some traffic being handled by his PMS vendor, and maybe a couple "go check their outbox" arrangements... all created in the interest of [perceived] economy. Eventually (unless his vendor figures out what a cash-cow the EDI-transaction business can be) the doctor's software may be able to receive messages directly. So what do we call each entity's incoming mailbox(es)? -Chris Christopher J. Feahr, OD http://visiondatastandard.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cell/Pager: 707-529-2268
