Healthcare Identifiers Service (HI Service)

The Healthcare Identifiers Service (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 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 is automatically assigned an IHI. Consumers who aren’t eligible for Medicare or DVA can apply for an IHI using the IHI service in myGov.
• Healthcare Provider Identifier–Individual - (HPI-I), assigned to healthcare providers such as GPs, pharmacist, nurse or psychiatrists. Every healthcare provider registered with AHPRA is automatically assigned an HPI-I. Healthcare providers who aren’t AHPRA registered may be 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.

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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

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