ADHA creates roadmap to increase healthcare identifier use

The Australian Digital Health Agency (ADHA) is attempting to scale up its healthcare identifiers service through a new five-year roadmap.

Peter O'Halloran from ADHA.

First unveiled in 2010, healthcare identifiers (HI) serve as way to identify patients, healthcare providers and organisations in the health system.

At present, according to ADHA [pdf], there is no consistency in HI use across health, disability and aged care programs.

The five-year plan aims to resolve issues such as patient data retrieval delays and risks of misidentification and privacy issues due to its “sparing” use across non-health workflows.

ADHA also said technical specifications and standards are out of date and “do not support real-time use”.

In addition, the HIS is said to be failing to “deliver cost-savings to all Australian governments” through different use of identifiers across health and care sectors.

The new roadmap aims to tackle these issues by transforming HIS into a “connected and interoperable health system” with identifiers used, for example, by medical professionals to upload details to My Health Record.

To achieve this, ADHA intends to improve “the quality and accuracy of the HIS” data, its functionality and awareness of the service beyond healthcare.

ASHA also hopes to take advantage of “significantly enhanced analytics” by streamlining the linkage of patient datasets and “leveraging artificial intelligence”.

The agency’s chief digital officer, Peter O’Halloran, called healthcare identifiers “a linchpin for safe, secure and seamless information sharing across the nation’s healthcare system in near real-time”.

“They are central to the evolution of digital health and will empower Australian healthcare consumers to have continuous care across all healthcare facilities in every corner of Australia,” he said.

The roadmap was developed as part of the Connecting Australian Healthcare - National Healthcare Interoperability Plan 2023-2028.

According to the report, healthcare identifiers across health and care services "underpin data quality and health systems interoperability”.

Last year, the government revealed that My Health Record is set to be rebuilt and modernised, and primary care IT infrastructure uplifted, via a major investment into digital healthcare.

By the end of this year, the government intends to place "legal obligations" on diagnostic imaging and pathology providers to upload reports to My Health Record.