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 provide 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 and 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 these participants in a healthcare event: the individual, the healthcare provider individual, and the healthcare provider organisation. The HI Service stores identifiers for these participants. The HI Service Business to Business (B2B) Gateway exposes SOAP based web services which allow your software to search for these identifiers. 

The healthcare identifiers used in the HI Service are:

• Individual Healthcare Identifier (IHI) An IHI identifies an individual healthcare recipient for healthcare purposes. Each individual enrolled in Medicare (or the Department of Veteran Affairs) gets an IHI automatically. IHIs are also available on request to other healthcare consumers (including permanent residents and visitors to Australia).
• Healthcare Provider Identifier–Individual (HPI–I) An HPI-I identifies an individual healthcare provider who provides healthcare, such as a general practitioner, allied health professional, specialist, nurse, dentist and pharmacist. A provider gets an HPI-I automatically when they register with the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (Ahpra). Members of other professions credentialled by a professional body with certain characteristics can also apply for an HPI-I.
• Healthcare Provider Identifier–Organisation (HPI–O) An HPI-O identifies a healthcare provider organisation where healthcare is provided, such as a hospital, medical practice, pathology laboratory, radiology laboratory and pharmacy. Organisations must register with the HI Service to obtain an HPI-O.

As of November 2025, the HI Service supports a fourth type of healthcare identifier, the Healthcare Support Service Provider - Organisation (HSP-O). 

An HSP-O identifies an organisation that provides services and support for older Australians and people with disability, such as in-home care and personal care services. Providers with an HSP-O will not have access to the My Health Record system. These identifiers are not yet discoverable in the HI Service but will be in future. 

Get Started

If you want to connect to the Healthcare Identifiers (HI) Service or integrate with My Health Record, watch this video then follow the steps on the Get Started page. To allow time to obtain the test certificates you will need to begin development, start the registration process as soon as possible.

Get Started

Developer Guides

If you are new to the HI Service and wish to register and begin development, then please follow our developer guides below:

• 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

To understand more about the Test and Go Live process, please see: 

• HI Service - Test and Go Live

If you are connecting your software to the My Health Record system, please refer to the combined developer guides here:  

• My Health Record B2B Gateway

Healthcare Identifiers Integration Toolkit

The Healthcare Identifiers 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. In 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

Information for Healthcare Professionals

The following page provides resources software vendors can share with customers to support the correct implementation and use of healthcare identifiers. Information provided explains the use of healthcare identifiers in a healthcare provider context. 

• https://www.digitalhealth.gov.au/healthcare-providers/initiatives-and-programs/healthcare-identifiers