Healthcare Identifiers Service (HI)

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:  

• My Health Record B2B Gateway

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:   

• Healthcare Identifiers Integration Toolkit

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.

• https://github.com/AuDigitalHealth/integration-toolkit-sample-code-java