Healthcare Identifiers
Healthcare identifiers enable information systems to accurately link health information to the correct individual or organisation. The national Healthcare Identifiers (HI) Service is managed by Medicare Australia and was developed to assign, issue and maintain separate identifiers for consumers, healthcare providers and provider organisations.
NEHTA's Compliance, Conformance & Accreditation (CCA) team, in conjunction with representatives from Medicare Australia, the Department of Health and Ageing, Medical Software Industry Association (MSIA), Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA), Aged Care IT Vendors Association (ACIVA) and State and Territory health departments, has developed conformance requirements and an assessment process to support the safe implementation and use of healthcare identifiers in health software. These conformance requirements apply to software systems that use the HI Service and systems that manage and use local copies of healthcare identifiers.
Correct handling and use of healthcare identifiers by health software helps improve efficiency and quality, reduce errors in managing patient information and supports improvement in the quality of patient healthcare.
Software systems requiring direct access to the HI Service must conform to both the HI Service system interface specification, published by Medicare Australia, and the HI software conformance requirements.
The Software Conformance Requirements for Healthcare Identifiers are expected to be operational by May 2011 and will govern the behaviour of software that uses national healthcare identifiers from the HI service. These requirements are separate and additional to the software tests required to satisfy Medicare Australia's Notice of Connection (NOC) process.
Once the first version of HI Software Conformance Requirements is published, a second version will be produced to incorporate requirements for messaging. Any additional requirements associated with the merging of patient records and management of other healthcare identifier types, such as HPI-Is, HPI-Os and CSPs, will also be included in the second release.
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