The Document Encryption profile provides a means to encrypt health documents independent of particular transports means, healthcare applications and document types thereby supporting end-to-end confidentiality in heterogeneous workflows and unanticipated workflows. It enables access to documents to be targeted to specific recipients. It addresses the need to protect documents from certain intermediaries in the document exchange path and provides confidentiality to transports that do not have a confidentiality mechanism. 
The Document Encryption profile allows for multiple alternatives for identity and key management which makes it suitable for a rich set of healthcare environments (many of which have a pre-existing key management infrastructure in place). Examples include symmetric keys, certificates, passwords, single and multiple recipients, and out-of-band key acquisition. To cater to these different situations the profile contains hooks to different technical key management methods.
