The HI Service is a national system for uniquely identifying individuals, healthcare provider individuals and healthcare provider organisations. Healthcare Identifiers allow us to have confidence that the correct information is associated with the correct individual at the point of care.
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.
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 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.
The HI Service consists of 3 types of identifiers;
- Individual Healthcare Identifier (IHI), assigned to Healthcare consumers. Every Australian with a Medicare Card or Department of Veteran’s Affairs (DVA) card has automatically been assigned an IHI.
- Healthcare Provider Identifier–Individual - (HPI-I), assigned to Healthcare providers, I.e. a GP, Pharmacist, Nurse or Psychiatrist. Every healthcare provider registered with AHPRA has automatically been assigned an HPI-I. Some healthcare providers who aren’t AHPRA registered are eligible to apply for an HPI-I.
- Healthcare Provider Identifier–Organisation (HPI-O), assigned to organisations such as General Practices, Pharmacies and Hospitals. Healthcare provider organisations must register for 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. If you would like to understand more about the Test and Go Live process then please view our overview here: HI Service - Test and Go Live
There are three recent changes for HI Service development which may be of interest to new and returning developers;
- HI Service Conformance Testing is now conducted by the Digital Health Agency at no cost, previously it was conducted by a 3rd party testing laboratory with associated costs.
- HI Service requirement 22000 is now mandatory. More information can be found in the related FAQs below.
- Software will now use a NASH certificate to connect to the HI Service, previously your customers had the choice of using their Medicare Site Certificate or a NASH certificate to connect to the HI Service. More information can be found at: National Authentication (NASH)
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 then you may wish to follow our combined developer guides here:
Healthcare Identifiers Integration Toolkit
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 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
Services Australia advice: Scheduled outage to vendor environment – 10 October 2023
Services Australia advises that due to scheduled maintenance, there will be an outage to the vendor environment between approximately 6.00pm-8.00pm on Tuesday 10 October 2023 (AEDT).
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 will discuss potential changes which are 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 frequently asked questions relate to the use of 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 the use of developers whose products connect to the Healthcare Identifiers (HI) Service, My Health Record, Electronic Prescribing and Secure Messaging with a National Authentication Service for Health (NASH) PKI Certificate.
NASH SHA-2 Testing & Assessment - Developer Guide
This Developer Guide provides guidance for developers on how to test their NASH SHA-2 software enhancements and submit evidence of their product’s readiness to the Agency for assessment.
Transition to NASH SHA-2 Certificates - Notifications
Changes to the National Authentication Service for Health (NASH) PKI certificates.
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: