The Healthcare Identifiers Service (HI Service) is a national system for uniquely identifying individuals, healthcare provider individuals and healthcare provider organisations.
Healthcare identifiers provide confidence that the correct information is associated with the correct individual at the point of care.
The HI Service is required for many aspects of digital health, including electronic prescribing, secure messaging and My Health Record. Get started below.
Overview
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 individual, 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 these identifiers.
The three identifiers used in the HI Service are:
- Individual Healthcare Identifier (IHI) An IHI identifies an individual healthcare recipient for healthcare purposes. Each individual enrolled in Medicare (or the Department of Veteran Affairs) gets an IHI automatically. IHIs are also available on request to other healthcare consumers (including permanent residents and visitors to Australia).
- Healthcare Provider Identifier–Individual (HPI–I) An HPI-I identifies an individual healthcare provider who provides healthcare, such as a general practitioner, allied health professional, specialist, nurse, dentist and pharmacist. A provider gets an HPI-I automatically when they register with the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (Ahpra). Members of other professional associations with certain characteristics can also apply for an HPI-I.
- Healthcare Provider Identifier–Organisation (HPI–O) An HPI-O identifies a healthcare provider organisation where healthcare is provided, such as a hospital, medical practice, pathology laboratory, radiology laboratory and pharmacy. Organisations must register with the HI Service to obtain an HPI-O.
If you are new to the HI Service and wish to register and begin development, then please follow our developer guides below. To understand more about the Test and Go Live process, please see: HI Service - Test and Go Live
Developer Guides
Refer below to access all developer guides including:
- HI Service - Registration and Certificates
- HI Service - IHI Lookup
- HI Service - IHI Lookup - Test Cases
- HI Service - Search for HPI-I
- HI Service - Additional requirements for Electronic Prescribing
- HI Service - Test and Go Live
If you are connecting your software to the My Health Record system, please refer to the combined developer guides here:
Healthcare Identifiers Integration Toolkit
The Healthcare Identifiers 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. In the HI Service Developer Guides, you will be provided direction to download the .NET NuGet package in Guide 1. The Healthcare Identifiers Integration Toolkit contains libraries for B2B connectivity to the Healthcare Identifiers service, used to search for IHI, HPI-Is and HPI-Os. For more information refer to:
Sample Code available from GitHub
Java based sample code equivalent to the dotnet code base. We are working on providing updates to the 'clinical-document-library' for existing and new CDA document types. Other clients are deemed sufficient as there have been no API changes.
Related content
Getting started education modules
If you are interested in integrating your software with the My Health Record system, we recommend starting by reviewing our education modules.
Online Technical Support (OTS) and Software Vendor Test (SVT) environment notifications
Online Technical Support (OTS) and Software Vendor Test (SVT) environment notifications
Developer guides
HI Service - Registration and Certificates
In this guide, you will register as a developer for the HI Service, request test certificates and test environment data, install the test certificates locally, import certificates in CIS software.
HI Service - IHI Lookup
Your software will need to conduct lookups for Individual Healthcare Identifiers (IHIs) for patients.
HI Service - IHI Lookup - Test Cases
After successfully executing the IHI Lookup, it is important to modify your implementation to meet the test cases for the use cases we have built to UC.010 and UC.015.
HI Service - Search for HPI-I
It is highly recommended that your software conduct HPI-I searches for users of your system.
HI Service - Additional requirements for Electronic Prescribing
This guide discusses potential changes required in your software.
HI Service - Test and Go Live
All products developed, or updated, to connect with the HI Service are required to undergo testing before production access is granted.
HI Service - FAQs
The following questions are about using healthcare identifiers in health software systems.
Open Source Sample Code Directory - GitHub and NuGet
The Agency provides sample code directly on GitHub, NuGet, and Maven.
NASH SHA-2 Certificates - Developer Guide
This developer guide is for developers whose products connect to the HI Service, My Health Record, electronic prescribing and secure messaging using a NASH (National Authentication Service for Health) PKI certificate.
Electronic Prescribing Sunset Dates for Conformance Profiles
The Australian Digital Health Agency (the Agency) has published a series of Electronic Prescribing (EP) Conformance Profiles (CP) with incremental increases in functionality.
What are the test endpoints?
HI Service and My Health Record test endpoint access information:
1003 – Healthcare Identifiers (HI) - OID Register
Listed below are the 1001 – Healthcare Identifiers (HI) - OID Register
Healthcare Identifiers Integration Toolkit
The Healthcare Identifiers Integration Toolkit contains libraries for B2B connectivity to the HI Service, used to search for IHI, HPI-Is and HPI-Os.
The sample code and integration tools provided here should only be used in conjunction with the Agency's detailed specifications for the HI Service and, where appropriate, by working with technical and other connectivity instruction provided by the System Operator of the Healthcare Identifiers Service.