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Overview

Healthcare provider organisations use Provider Connect Australia™ (also known as PCA™) to keep their business partners up to date with details about their organisation, locations, healthcare services, and the practitioners that provide these services.

Healthcare provider organisations can maintain their details using the PCA™ web application or a conformant publishing system. Publishing systems could include practice management software, clinical information systems or other administrative systems.

Publishing systems that integrate with the PCA™ FHIR® API will be able to synchronise saved details that are already stored in the publishing system with PCA™.

Business partners can use PCA™ to receive information that has been published to them from healthcare provider organisations. Business partners can receive notifications when information has changed or new data is available, to ensure that their customer details are always kept up to date.

Business partners that integrate with the PCA™ FHIR® API will be able to:

  • Receive real time notifications when new changes are available
  • Query the API for all changes since the last query
  • Automate the matching and processing of data that has been published to them
  • Prefill online forms using PCA™ to streamline the registration process for their customers
  • Query the API for all changes since the last query
  • Receive real time notifications when new changes are available

To become a business partner with PCA™, please email [email protected].

In the resources listed below:

  • The Business Partner Welcome Pack contains guides to help business partners register their organisation with PCA™ to receive information that has been published to them from healthcare provider organisations.
  • The Conformance product contains documentation and other resources related to software conformance requirements for software vendors to integrate their software with PCA™.

Developer guides

PCA™ - Getting started

The developer guide is intended to get you up-and-running with using the PCA™ API. It covers everything you need to know from registration, authorisation, participation to publication and subscription.

PCA™ - Client registration

Register our system as a client with the PCA™ Identity and Access Manager as per OAuth 2.0 Dynamic Client Registration Protocol – RFC 7591.

PCA™ - Participation configuration

Before using PCA as a publisher or subscriber, an organisation must, register, submit a participation agreement by an individual representative of the organisation, authorise a client for that organisation.

PCA™ - FHIR® Implementation Guide

The Provider Connect Australia™ (PCA™) FHIR® Implementation Guide is an HL7™ FHIR® specification for the APIs offered by the Provider Connect Australia™ service.

PCA™ - Count and paging

The _count search parameter returns the number of requested resources per page (excluding the resources returned with _include search parameter) as requested by the client.

PCA™ - Create location

We have already created the Organization resource as part of the participation configuration process and now we need to create Locations for the Organisation.

PCA™ - Create practitioner role

Now that you have created an Organization and HealthcareService at a Location, and have found a Practitioner, you can create a PractitionerRole.

PCA™ - Find a practitioner

Before you can create a PractitionerRole, you must first find an existing Practitioner using their AHPRA Registration Number.

PCA™ - Generate JWK set

Prior to registration, the client software needs to generate a 2048-bit RSA key pair as defined in PKCS #1: RSA Cryptography Specifications – RFC 8017 and conveyed using  JSON Web Key (JWK) – RFC 7517.

PCA™ - Generate JWT

Before a client can interact with the PCA™, it needs to generate a JSON Web Token (JWT) - RFC7519 that will be used to authenticate the client to the PCA™ Identity and Access Manager.

PCA™ - Get status of matched records

Once a business partner has attempted to match the service offerings that a publisher has authorised, it may provide the status of those matches back to the PCA™ for the publisher to download. This provides confirmation back to the publisher of the status of matched records.

PCA™ - Include and iterate

In some cases where the requesting subscription system is stateless or in events where you want all elements referenced irrespective of whether they have changed, a requesting system may use other filter expressions.

PCA™ - Publisher

Registering a publisher organisation as a participant in the Provider Connect Australia™ (PCA™) can only be done through the Provider Connect Australia™ (PCA™) portal.

PCA™ - Register client

Access to register endpoint requires an initial access token (IAT) of type bearer. Publisher and Subscriber organisations must now request an IAT by registering their software details with the PCA™ Operator first.

PCA™ - Register notification channel

In order for a subscriber to know that information has become available based on some defined criteria, the subscriber needs register a notification channel either via the Portal or using an API.

PCA™ - Submit match record

Once you have obtained service offerings from the PCA™, the business partner will use the sourced information to match records internally.

PCA™ - Subscriber (Business partner)

Registering a business partner organisation as a participant in Provider Connect Australia™ (PCA™) can only be done through the Provider Connect Australia™ (PCA™) portal.

PCA™ - Update business partner identifier

In cases when a publisher submits a business partner identifier and the business partner identifies that an incorrect identifier has been provided the business partner can patch the identifier provided in PCA™.

Resources

Provider Connect Australia™ - Business Partner Welcome Pack v1.1

ID
EP-3890:2024
Type
Product
Version
1.1
Status
Active
The Provider Connect Australia™ (PCA™) Business Partner Welcome Pack contains guides to help business partners register their organisation with PCA™ to receive information that has been published to them from healthcare provider organisations. To enquire about becoming a PCA™ business partner, or for more information, please email…

Provider Connect Australia™ – Conformance v2.0

ID
EP-3826:2023
Type
Product
Version
2.0
Status
Active
The Provider Connect Australia™ (PCA™) document library contains documentation and other resources related to software conformance requirements for software vendors to integrate their software with the PCA solution. It is updated on an as-needed basis, when new or updated resources become available, or when existing resources need to be…

Provider Connect Australia™ – Testing Utilities v2.40

ID
EP-3848:2023
Type
Product
Version
2.40
Status
Active
You can use a client such as Postman for testing. The latest collections and environment imports are in the ZIP file linked below: Quick start guide Step   Details 1 Install Postman and create a PCA™ workspace 2 Unzip the latest postman collections archive above 3 Import all extracted files into PCA™ workspace 4…

Trade marks of the Australian Digital Health Agency: 
Provider Connect Australia™, Helping healthcare providers stay connected™

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