Australia's digital health leaders have identified healthcare identifiers as the critical foundation for the next phase of interoperability. Without them, the rest won’t work.
Healthcare identifiers have emerged as the next major priority for Australia’s digital health reforms, with senior Commonwealth, state and territory leaders declaring the national rollout of identifiers the key to unlocking the next phase of connected care.
While discussions at the Australian Institute of Digital Health’s HIC2026 conference covered everything from artificial intelligence and My Health Record to Health Connect Australia and provider directories, healthcare identifiers repeatedly surfaced as the next critical piece of national digital infrastructure.
Australian Digital Health Agency chief executive Amanda Cattermole said healthcare identifiers had become the Agency’s single biggest focus as work shifted from building digital health foundations to delivering system-wide interoperability.
“If I had one thing [to achieve in the next 12 months] … it’s healthcare identifiers,” Ms Cattermole said in a State of the Nation panel.
She explained that until healthcare identifiers are used consistently across the system, so that both the person and their information are reliably linked wherever they go, we won’t achieve the final level of trust needed for secure, authorised information sharing.
Ms Cattermole said the work had become more urgent as Australia moved beyond building digital infrastructure into making it work across the health system.
“There is more to do, and the acuity of it, and the laborious, considered methodological work that needs to be done gets more acute and harder,” she said.
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Department of Health, Disability and Ageing first assistant secretary Duncan MacIntyre said the Individual Healthcare Identifier (IHI) had the potential to become foundational national infrastructure, comparing it to the Australian Business Number.
“It’s now 25 years ago that I was involved in the development of the ABN lookup service,” Mr MacIntyre said.
“At the time everyone thought was, ‘Oh how important is it going to be to be able to look up somebody’s ABN?’ But now it’s the service that underpins our tax system.
“It’s the thing that means that you can wave your phone at a terminal from a tiny little business that’s selling coffee, and immediately they can know they’ll get paid.
“The IHI is going to be available to do the same kind of thing in healthcare, and I’m really excited to be able to be there at the start of that process.”
Queensland’s deputy director-general of eHealth, Dr Tanya Kelly, said healthcare identifiers were essential if Australia was to overcome longstanding barriers to sharing information between public and private healthcare.
“We, as a jurisdiction, have really struggled with that interoperability challenge between public and private,” Dr Kelly said.
“And the only way to deal with it is through national identifiers and bringing the infrastructure up to the national level above all of those places to have a place to look at it.”
“So it’s the only way, and it’s amazing.”
Dr Kelly said Queensland had aligned its provider and patient identity blueprint with the national healthcare identifiers framework as it built new provider directories and enterprise infrastructure.
“We have a provider and a patient identity blueprint now that is very much aligned to the national digital health identifiers and standards,” Dr Kelly said.
Healthcare identifiers assign unique numbers to patients, healthcare providers, and healthcare organisations, allowing health information to be matched accurately as it moves between clinical systems.
Ms Cattermole said the healthcare identifiers roadmap now sat behind the National Digital Health Delivery Plan because other foundational reforms had reached the point where identifiers had become the next priority.
“That’s why that health identifiers roadmap is behind the national job delivery plan,” she said.
“We had to get so many other pieces in line, and they are now … humming forward.
“We are well ahead on the interoperability plan, 80% done well before … the end of the actual commitment time … but we’ve got these really tough pieces [left to do].”
Mr MacIntyre said healthcare identifiers would underpin the next generation of digital health services.
“I think that the healthcare identifier is an absolute foundation that could unlock complete transformation in space.”