About healthcare identifiers
Healthcare identifiers are purpose-built for healthcare settings, persist throughout an individual’s entire life and can consistently and uniquely identify and connect healthcare recipients to providers and provider organisations. By contrast, a person may have multiple Medicare numbers over their lifetime if their circumstances change, e.g. they transition from their parent’s card to their own, or they share a card with a partner and/or children.
Healthcare identifiers are unique 16-digit numbers assigned to:
- Individuals: An Individual Healthcare Identifier (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).
- Individual healthcare providers: A Healthcare Provider Identifier – Individual (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). Other health professionals meeting certain criteria can also apply for an HPI-I.
- Organisations that provide health services: A Healthcare Provider Identifier–Organisation (HPI–O) identifies a healthcare provider organisation where healthcare is provided, such as a hospital, medical practice, pathology laboratory and radiology laboratory. Organisations must register with the HI Service to obtain an HPI-O.
See how to apply for an IHI.
See how to apply for an HPI-I and HPI-O.
The Healthcare Identifiers Service
The Healthcare Identifiers Service (HI Service) is a national system that assigns and uniquely identifies individuals, health providers and organisations. The HI Service supports many aspects of digital health, including electronic prescribing, secure messaging and My Health Record. The Chief Executive Medicare oversees the HI Service.
Purpose of Healthcare Identifiers
Healthcare identifiers are administered under the Healthcare Identifiers Act 2010 (Cth) (HI Act). The objective of the Act is to provide the foundations for safe and reliable healthcare-related communication and exchange of health information between providers and patients, and to pave the way for an interoperable, digitally connected national health system.
Healthcare identifiers connect the right information with the right individual at the point of care. This gives both healthcare providers and patients confidence that they are using the correct information, wherever and whenever they provide or receive healthcare.
Changes to the Healthcare Identifiers Act 2010
Healthcare identifiers play a crucial role in enabling the secure and accurate exchange of health information between national digital health systems, such as My Health Record and electronic prescribing. However broad adoption of the identifiers has been slow.
A review and public consultation of the Healthcare Identifiers Act 2010 (Cth) (the Act) identified that in order to maximise the benefits of Healthcare Identifiers (HIs) and encourage greater adoption and use, it is essential to:
- expand the types of providers who can be assigned an HI, and
- broaden the purposes for which HIs can be utilised.
As a result, changes to the Healthcare Identifiers Act are being progressed, including:
- Establishment of a new type of healthcare identifier for healthcare support service providers (eligible providers will be assigned an organisation identifier to be known as a HSP-O), including those that assist older Australians and people with disability
- Creation of authorisations for ‘Health Administration Entities’ (HAE) which will allow relevant entities to use HIs for health-related administrative activities, such as supporting the delivery and monitoring of health programs
- A broader range of allied health professionals will now be eligible for a Healthcare Provider Identifier – Individual (HPI-I)
Simplifying the process for assigning HPI-Is to allied health professionals who are not registered with the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (Ahpra).
Why the changes are important
These changes aim to:
- Promote wider HI use: For HIs to be able to deliver maximum benefit, they need to be used widely and consistently across multiple care settings. However, HIs are currently only able to be assigned to healthcare providers (for example, GPs, nurses, specialists, some allied health providers, and pharmacists) and healthcare organisations (such as hospitals and general practices). This creates gaps for consumers receiving other crucial supports from disability and aged care provider organisations that are not currently eligible for an HI or to handle HIs. It also impedes the ability of GPs and specialists to have visibility of the full range of support and care consumers receive.
- Better joined-up experience for patients: Change is needed to recognise the importance of those ancillary care and support services which contribute to better health outcomes, and to provide a more joined-up experience, in particular for those consumers receiving care and support across multiple settings.
- Broaden and clarify the purposes for which HIs can be used: HIs are also limited in the purposes for which they can be used. For example, they cannot be used for health administration purposes, which causes inefficiencies for providers because they cannot integrate their clinical and administration systems and need to maintain separate identifiers for each. The HI Act is also unclear in its authorisations for HIs to be used to support research and analysis of health data for policy and planning purposes, despite this being one of the original intentions of the HI Act when first introduced.
Data use, security and governance
Use and storage
Individuals via My Health Record and healthcare providers via various clinical systems, use healthcare identifiers to ensure information is accurate and up to date. Healthcare identifier information is stored in the HI Service, which is administered by Services Australia.
All healthcare identifier information is stored in strict compliance with security and privacy controls (see below).
Governance
The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) is the independent regulator of the privacy aspects of the Healthcare Identifiers Act 2010 (HI Act). It also monitors the HI Service and handles complaints.
Security and privacy
The HI Service protects individual privacy through legislation and technical security and access controls.
The Healthcare Identifiers Act 2010 specifies that healthcare identifiers can be used for healthcare and related management purposes, with penalties in place for misuse.
Find out more about:
Reviews
At the end of each financial year, the HI service operator reports on its:
- activities
- finances
- operations.
The Ministerial Council and the Minister for Health review the annual reports, which are available from Services Australia.
Find out more
Read the frequently asked questions for more information
Amendments to the Healthcare Identifiers Act 2010 under the Aged Care and Other Legislation Amendments Bill 2025: Frequently asked questions
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