How it works
Provider Connect Australia™ reduces red tape for healthcare provider organisations and improves the quality of healthcare service information throughout the healthcare ecosystem.
The staged national rollout of Provider Connect Australia™ began in March 2023 in a staged manner.
The rollout initially focuses on GPs and pharmacies who provide vaccines services, to ensure they are equipped to manage their services ahead of the winter season.
This will be followed by a broader national rollout for all healthcare organisations from July onwards.
Healthcare provider organisations will soon be able to use Provider Connect Australia™ to connect with their business partners and streamline updates of the services they provide and the practitioners that provide them. By providing consistent, up to date information about healthcare services to funders, hospitals, health service directories, communications services and other key partners in healthcare delivery, Provider Connect Australia™ will ensure that providers and consumers have access to the information they need when they need it. This will lead to a more efficient, connected, and accessible healthcare system.
"By providing this national service, the Agency can improve the quality and reliability of healthcare service details in directories and other services, including Medicare, and significantly reduce the administrative burden on healthcare organisations,"
- Amanda Cattermole PSM, Australian Digital Health Agency CEO.
Provider Connect Australia™ also creates unique identifiers for healthcare services, service delivery locations and practitioners’ service delivery roles, allowing these to be reliably identified and linked across the healthcare system.
Accurate and reliable information about healthcare services is a key foundation to improving interoperability and supporting a digitally connected healthcare system.
The current registration challenge
Healthcare provider organisations rely on many business partners to support their healthcare service delivery. In most cases these business partners require the healthcare provider organisation to register details of the services they provide and the practitioners that provide them. Registering these details with these partners and keeping them up to date with changes can be a significant burden.
For example, when a new practitioner joins a healthcare service, forms must be completed to update each partner. Conversely, when a practitioner leaves a healthcare service, the business partners also need to be notified.
Unique identifiers complement existing national identifiers for healthcare provider organisations and individuals
The impacts
Manually notifying business partners whenever an organisation’s service delivery details change is not only cumbersome, but can lead to human error, too. Common impacts include:
- Time-poor staff may only notify the highest-priority partners like the funders, leaving other partners (such as health services directories and hospitals) with incomplete and out-of-date information.
- Many might also not be advised when practitioners have left a healthcare service, resulting in referrals and reports not reaching the desks of the right healthcare recipient.
- Errors are made in the completion of forms (both paper or online) and further errors made on transcribing the information into partners’ systems.
- Poor usability of secure messaging. There is no way to reliably identify healthcare services, resulting in significant manual effort in the addressing of electronic messages. This is one of the most significant barriers to the success of secure messaging and will continue to hamper future efforts at healthcare system interoperability.
Benefits to business partners
Business partners using Provider Connect Australia™ can streamline their client registration process, and reduce or eliminate the potential for errors from manually transcribing information.
- Lower cost of processing client registrations
- Lower cost of processing client updates
- Improved client satisfaction
- Streamlined client registration and updates
- Improved timeliness, completeness and accuracy of client data
Find out more about the benefits of becoming a business partner
We encourage all business partners to join Provider Connect Australia.
For more information about becoming a Provider Connect Australia™ business partner, please email [email protected]
