The Healthcare Identifiers Service (HI Service) is required for many aspects of Digital Health including Electronic Prescribing, Secure Messaging or My Health Record. Get started below.
Before building Digital Health functionality (such as Electronic Prescribing, Secure Messaging or My Health Record) your software must first be able to identify the three participants in a healthcare event; the patient, the healthcare provider individual, and the healthcare provider organisation. The HI Service stores identifiers for these three participants. The HI Service Business to Business (B2B) Gateway exposes SOAP based web services which allow your software to search for identifiers for these parties.
If you are new to the HI Service and wish to register and begin development then please follow our developer guides below. If you would like to understand more about the Test and Go Live process then please view our overview here: https://developer.digitalhealth.gov.au/resources/faqs/hi-test-and-go-live
There are three recent changes for HI Service development which may be of interest to new and returning developers;
Start with the Registration and Introduction below - this includes mandatory registration requirements and reading.
| Introduction: | Registration and Introduction to the HI Service |
| Guide 1: | IHI Lookup |
| Guide 2: | IHI Lookup - Test Cases |
| Guide 3: | Search for HPI-I |
| Guide 4: | Additional HI Service requirements for Electronic Prescribing |
If you are connecting your software to the My Health Record system then you may wish to follow our combined developer guides here:
https://developer.digitalhealth.gov.au/developer-guide/my-health-record-b2b-developer-guides
The HI Integration Toolkit is a collection of sample code available in both .NET and Java. This toolkit is available for download via this website, GitHub and NuGet. If you are following the HI Service Developer Guides, you will download the .NET NuGet package in Guide 1.
The Healthcare Identifiers Service (HI) is a national system for uniquely identifying individuals and healthcare providers. HIs help to ensure individuals and providers can have confidence that the correct information is associated with the correct individual at the point of care.
These documents provide background and guidance for healthcare provider organisations, and conformance, compliance and accreditation requirements for vendors, regarding the Healthcare Identifiers Service.
The following frequently asked questions relate to the use of Healthcare Identifiers in Health Software Systems.
No current notifications - Refer also to:
Transition to NASH SHA-2 Certificates - Notifications
The Victorian IHI Pre-Implementation project is to develop a suite of system design artefacts to support integration of the national Individual Healthcare Identifier into health services’ patient administration systems.
An issue was identified with the Healthcare Identifiers (HI) Service IHI Inquiry web services, affecting the date of birth field. This issue resulted in a timezone to the consumer date of birth value in the IHI search response.
From the 1st of November 2020, the Australian Digital Health Agency (the Agency) will be conducting Healthcare Identifier (HI) Conformance testing.
By operation of the Public Governance, Performance and Accountability (Establishing the Australian Digital Health Agency) Rule 2016, on 1 July 2016, all the assets and liabilities of NEHTA will vest in the Australian Digital Health Agency. In this website, on and from 1 July 2016, all references to "National E-Health Transition Authority" or "NEHTA" will be deemed to be references to the Australian Digital Health Agency. PCEHR means the My Health Record, formerly the "Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record", within the meaning of the My Health Records Act 2012 (Cth), formerly called the Personally Controlled Electronic Health Records Act 2012 (Cth).
