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.
Services Australia advice: Scheduled outage to the vendor environment – 10 November 2021 - Services Australia advises that due to scheduled maintenance, the vendor environment will be unavailable from 8.00pm – 11:30pm Wednesday 10 November 2021 (AEDT).
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.
For more information regarding the use of Healthcare Identifiers in Health Software Systems refer to the following FAQs:
Ref: XGSETEPD2-30092021
To gain access to the HI Service Software Vendor Test (SVT) Environment you will need to register on the Health Systems Developer Portal provided by Services Australia. Learn more at:
Ref: XGSETEPD3-19102021
To minimise the risk to clinical safety, privacy, and security arising from the use of healthcare identifiers, software systems must undergo testing before being approved to connect with the HI Service. There are two mandatory testing processes that must be completed:
1. Services Australia’s Notice of Connection (NOC)
2. HI Conformance testing with the Australian Digital Health Agency (the Agency)
From 1 November 2020, a new conformance requirement will be implemented to improve data quality and accuracy of information. Through the expanding use of healthcare identifiers, the Agency has implemented requirement 22000 – Revalidation of an Individual Healthcare Identifier (IHI). The additional requirement will ensure clinical information systems retrieve the correct IHI when there is a change to essential identifiers.
All new and existing software developers must conform to Mandatory requirement 22000. Current software developers must contact the Agency to discuss retesting requirements. Information on the requirement can be found in the Use of Healthcare Identifiers in Health Software Systems Conformance Profile. A link to this document will be available here soon. For further assistance, please contact the Agency at [email protected].
Ref: XGSETEPD1-30092021
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).
