hiConnect®: The Foundation of Australian Digital Health Integration

Australia’s digital health ecosystem is built on a fundamental requirement: accurately identifying patients, healthcare providers and organisations across connected healthcare systems.

At the centre of this is the Healthcare Identifiers Service (HI Service), a national service that enables healthcare software to securely identify the people and organisations involved in delivering care.

For healthcare software developers, integrating with the HI Service is often one of the first steps towards connecting with Australia’s broader digital health infrastructure.

At HITORI, we’ve simplified this process with hiConnect®, our middleware solution that provides access to the HI Service through a straightforward REST API.

What is the Healthcare Identifiers Service?

The Healthcare Identifiers Service is an Australian Government service operated by Services Australia that provides unique identifiers for individuals, healthcare professionals and healthcare organisations.

These identifiers enable healthcare information to be accurately associated with the correct patient, provider and organisation when exchanged between digital health systems.

Together, these identifiers establish a consistent approach to identifying participants across Australia’s healthcare system, helping ensure the right information is associated with the right people.

The three primary identifiers used across clinical integrations are:

• Individual Healthcare Identifier (IHI): A unique identifier assigned to an individual receiving healthcare in Australia.
• Healthcare Provider Identifier – Individual (HPI-I): Identifies an individual healthcare professional, such as a doctor, specialist or pharmacist.
• Healthcare Provider Identifier – Organisation (HPI-O): Identifies a healthcare organisation, such as a medical practice, hospital or pharmacy.

The foundation of Australia’s digital health ecosystem

The HI Service is more than a patient identification service. It is one of the foundational components of Australia’s national digital health infrastructure.

Before healthcare software can integrate with services such as electronic prescribing or My Health Record, it generally needs the ability to identify patients, providers and organisations using national healthcare identifiers.

These identifiers support secure and accurate information exchange across a growing range of digital health services, including:

• Electronic prescribing: Identifying patients, prescribers and healthcare organisations involved in creating and exchanging electronic prescriptions.
• My Health Record: Associating clinical documents and health information with the correct individuals and healthcare providers.
• Secure messaging: Supporting the accurate identification of healthcare providers and organisations exchanging clinical information.
• Clinical information exchange: Enabling consistent identification across healthcare systems and organisations.

By establishing connectivity with the HI Service, healthcare software providers create an important foundation for implementing these and other national digital health capabilities.

Simplifying HI Service integration with hiConnect®

Integrating directly with the HI Service requires developers to implement specialised SOAP-based web services, manage authentication certificates and meet applicable technical and conformance requirements.

For modern healthcare platforms built using REST APIs, this can introduce unnecessary complexity.

hiConnect® simplifies this integration by providing a modern REST API interface to the Healthcare Identifiers Service.

Rather than building and maintaining the underlying HI Service connectivity from scratch, developers can integrate hiConnect® into their existing applications using familiar API requests.

Key benefits include:

• Simple REST API: Access HI Service functionality through straightforward JSON requests and responses.
• Patient IHI lookup and verification: Retrieve or verify an Individual Healthcare Identifier using supported patient demographic and identification details.
• Reduced development complexity: Avoid implementing the underlying SOAP connectivity and certificate handling directly within your application.
• Flexible integration: Designed to work with existing practice management systems, telehealth platforms, electronic medical records and custom healthcare applications.
• Greater control: Integrate directly into your own platform and workflows without relying on an external clinical application.

hiConnect® provides the underlying connectivity layer, allowing development teams to focus on building their healthcare products rather than managing the complexity of government integration protocols.

Built into rxConnect® and mhrConnect®

hiConnect® is also a core component of HITORI’s broader digital health middleware products.

Our solutions are designed to work together, providing healthcare software developers with a consistent approach to integrating with Australia’s national digital health services.

rxConnect® for Electronic prescribing

Our rxConnect® middleware provides integration with Australia’s electronic prescribing infrastructure.

hiConnect® is included with rxConnect®, enabling healthcare platforms to retrieve or verify patient IHIs as part of the electronic prescribing workflow.

mhrConnect® for My Health Record

Our mhrConnect® middleware simplifies integration with Australia’s My Health Record system, enabling healthcare applications to access and exchange supported clinical information.

hiConnect® provides the foundational HI Service connectivity required for identifying patients and healthcare participants involved in these interactions.

By including hiConnect® within both products, HITORI provides a common foundation for healthcare businesses looking to implement multiple national digital health integrations.

Building a foundation for future integrations

Connecting to the HI Service is not just about meeting today’s integration requirements. It also establishes an important building block for future connectivity across Australia’s expanding digital health ecosystem.

Once a healthcare platform has established its healthcare identifier capabilities, it is better positioned to support additional integrations, including:

• Medicare Online claiming: Supporting future integration with Medicare claiming services alongside their separate authentication, technical and approval requirements.
• Australian Immunisation Register (AIR): Enabling immunisation-related workflows and integration with Australia’s national vaccination register.
• Electronic National Residential Medication Charts (eNRMC): Supporting electronic medication management workflows in residential aged care.
• Aged care information exchange: Supporting emerging capabilities for sharing relevant healthcare information across aged care and clinical systems.
• Other Australian Government digital health services: Providing a reusable identity foundation as new national digital health capabilities become available.

While each service has its own technical, regulatory and conformance requirements, the HI Service provides an important common layer for identifying healthcare participants across connected systems.

For healthcare organisations building long-term platforms, establishing this foundation early can reduce duplication and simplify future development.

Your platform. Connected.

At HITORI, we believe healthcare businesses should be able to build and own their digital platforms without the complexity of developing every government integration from scratch.

Our middleware products, including hiConnect®, rxConnect® and mhrConnect®, provide the underlying connectivity needed to participate in Australia’s digital health ecosystem while allowing developers to maintain control of their own applications, infrastructure and workflows.

Whether you’re developing a telehealth platform, practice management system, electronic medical record or a new digital health product, hiConnect® provides a practical starting point for connecting to Australia’s national healthcare infrastructure.

Building a connected healthcare platform?

Get in touch with HITORI to learn how hiConnect®, rxConnect® and mhrConnect® can support your integration requirements.