A patient may see a GP, specialist, hospital, pathology provider, radiologist and allied health professional throughout their healthcare journey. Each provider may generate important clinical information, but for that information to be useful, healthcare systems need to know that it belongs to the right person. This is where the Individual Healthcare Identifier (IHI) comes in. Australia’s healthcare identifier system is designed to help accurately connect patients with their health information and support the secure exchange of information across different healthcare settings.[1]
What Is an Individual Healthcare Identifier?
An Individual Healthcare Identifier, commonly known as an IHI, is a unique 16-digit number used to identify an individual for healthcare purposes in Australia.
Every person enrolled in Medicare or the Department of Veterans’ Affairs is automatically assigned an IHI. People who are not eligible for Medicare can also obtain an IHI on request, including visitors and other healthcare consumers.[1]
Importantly, an IHI is not the same as a Medicare number. A Medicare number can change in certain circumstances, while an IHI is designed to provide a persistent identifier for an individual across their healthcare journey.[1]
Key insight: An IHI is not a medical record. It is an identifier that helps healthcare systems make sure the information being accessed or exchanged belongs to the correct patient.
Why Does Patient Identification Matter?
For a medical specialist, a patient’s healthcare information rarely exists in one place.
A specialist may receive a referral from a GP, review pathology results from a laboratory, access diagnostic imaging, communicate with a hospital and share information back with the referring practitioner.
Each interaction creates another opportunity for information to be exchanged between different healthcare organisations and software systems.
The Australian Government describes healthcare identifiers as a foundation for safe and reliable communication and the exchange of health information. They are designed to help connect the right information with the right individual at the point of care.[1]
This may sound straightforward, but accurately matching patients between different systems can be surprisingly complex.
Patients may have different addresses, phone numbers or email addresses recorded by different providers. Names may be entered differently, information may be incomplete and healthcare organisations may use different systems to store and exchange information.
Research into patient matching has highlighted the importance of accurately identifying patients within and across healthcare organisations so that providers can develop a more complete view of a patient’s health information.[2]
From Patient Identification to Interoperability
An IHI is only one part of a much larger digital health system.
Healthcare interoperability is the ability of different healthcare systems and organisations to exchange and use information effectively.
For example, a specialist practice might need to exchange information with a hospital, pathology provider or another medical practice. Simply being able to send data from one system to another does not necessarily mean the receiving system can understand and use that information correctly.
A 2025 scoping review of electronic health record interoperability examined 24 publications and identified several levels of interoperability, including technical, structural, semantic and organisational interoperability. The researchers identified semantic interoperability, preserving the meaning of information when it is exchanged, as one of the major challenges facing healthcare systems.[3]
In practical terms, this means that healthcare systems need to do more than move information. They need to make sure that information remains meaningful when it moves between systems.
Why it matters: Connecting two healthcare systems is only useful if the information being exchanged can be accurately matched to the patient and understood by the system receiving it.
The IHI Is Part of a Bigger Healthcare Identifier System
The IHI is designed to identify the patient, but patients are only one part of the healthcare ecosystem.
Australia’s Healthcare Identifiers Service also provides identifiers for healthcare providers and healthcare organisations.
A Healthcare Provider Identifier – Individual (HPI-I) identifies an individual healthcare provider, such as a specialist, GP, allied health professional or pharmacist.
A Healthcare Provider Identifier – Organisation (HPI-O) identifies a healthcare organisation, such as a medical practice, hospital, pathology laboratory or radiology laboratory.[1]
Together, these identifiers help establish three important pieces of information:
Who is the patient?
The Individual Healthcare Identifier (IHI)
Who is the healthcare professional?
The Healthcare Provider Identifier – Individual (HPI-I)
Which organisation is providing healthcare?
The Healthcare Provider Identifier – Organisation (HPI-O)
This creates an important foundation for securely exchanging information between patients, healthcare professionals and healthcare organisations.
Why Interoperability Matters to Medical Specialists
For specialists, interoperability is not simply a technical concept. It can affect how easily information can be accessed throughout a patient’s care journey.
Consider a patient who is referred to a specialist following an abnormal investigation.
The patient’s relevant information may include their referral, previous diagnoses, medications, pathology results, imaging, allergies and previous hospital admissions.
If that information is already available through connected healthcare systems, the specialist may be able to access important information without relying entirely on manual requests, phone calls, faxes or patients remembering exactly what happened during previous consultations.
This is one of the broader goals of Australia’s digital health infrastructure: making important health information available to authorised healthcare providers when it is needed.
Australia’s My Health Record system, for example, can contain information including pathology reports, diagnostic imaging reports, prescription and dispensing information, immunisation information and hospital discharge summaries.[4]
The potential benefit for specialists is particularly relevant when patients move between different healthcare settings or receive care from multiple providers.
What Does Recent Research Tell Us About Interoperability?
Research published in recent years suggests that healthcare interoperability is moving well beyond simply connecting electronic medical records.
A 2025 comprehensive review examined more than 2,000 studies relating to electronic health records and interoperability over a 25-year period. The researchers found that EHRs have evolved from systems primarily focused on documentation towards increasingly sophisticated applications involving data sharing, artificial intelligence, analytics, public health and medical research.[5]
However, other recent research shows that significant challenges remain.
A 2024 scoping review examining interoperability between patient portals and electronic health records identified identification of individuals, data standards, information systems, consent, security and privacy among the key challenges that need to be addressed to enable effective information exchange.[6]
Research published in 2026 has also highlighted the importance of standardised healthcare data. An Australian study examining electronic health record data found that some core clinical information was captured consistently, but other information, including prescribing indications and allergy severity, was recorded less consistently between systems.[7]
This highlights an important distinction: having electronic information does not automatically mean that the information is standardised, complete or easy to exchange.
The bigger picture: The future of connected healthcare depends not only on collecting more information, but on making sure information can be accurately identified, understood, exchanged and used.
Why Data Standards Matter for Specialists
Medical specialists deal with highly detailed clinical information. Diagnoses, medications, allergies, pathology, imaging, clinical observations and specialist assessments all need to be recorded in ways that allow them to remain useful over time.
When information is stored in different formats or recorded inconsistently, exchanging it between systems becomes more difficult.
Recent research into electronic health record interoperability has highlighted the importance of standardised data structures, terminology and vocabularies in allowing information to retain its meaning when exchanged between systems.[3]
This is particularly relevant as healthcare systems become more connected and new technologies increasingly depend on structured clinical information.
Artificial intelligence, clinical decision support, analytics and other digital health technologies all depend on access to useful healthcare data.
If information cannot be reliably identified, standardised and exchanged, the potential benefits of these technologies become more difficult to realise.
Australia’s Healthcare Identifier System Is Evolving
The role of healthcare identifiers in Australia is also expanding.
Changes to the Healthcare Identifiers Act 2010 were introduced in phases during 2025, expanding the framework and supporting broader use of healthcare identifiers across healthcare and related services.[1]
The Australian Government has also stated that further changes are intended to support the use of healthcare identifiers in emerging health technology solutions such as wearable devices and monitors from February 2027.[1]
This points towards a healthcare environment where information may increasingly be generated and exchanged across a much wider range of systems and devices.
For specialists, this could mean that the clinical record of the future is not limited to information entered during a consultation. It may incorporate information from hospitals, diagnostic services, digital health platforms, connected devices and other parts of the healthcare system.
Reliable patient identification becomes increasingly important as the number of sources contributing information grows.
What Does This Mean for Specialist Practices?
For a specialist practice, the growing focus on interoperability raises some practical considerations when evaluating clinical and practice management software.
Specialists should consider whether their systems can support the broader digital health ecosystem rather than operating as an isolated database.
This includes considering:
Patient identification: Can the system accurately manage the information required to identify patients?
Digital health connectivity: Can the practice connect with relevant national digital health services?
Information exchange: Can information be securely shared with other healthcare providers and organisations?
Clinical data: Is important information stored in a structured and usable format?
Integrations: Can the system work with other healthcare applications and services?
Future readiness: Can the software evolve as Australia’s digital health infrastructure and standards develop?
These considerations are becoming increasingly important as healthcare moves towards more connected models of care.
The Future of Connected Healthcare
The IHI may seem like a relatively small part of a medical practice’s day-to-day operations, but it represents something much larger.
Healthcare is gradually moving from isolated systems towards a more connected digital ecosystem where information can move between different providers, organisations and technologies.
For that ecosystem to work effectively, healthcare needs reliable ways to identify patients, providers and organisations. It also needs common standards, secure information exchange and software capable of working with other systems.
Recent research suggests that interoperability remains a complex challenge, but it also demonstrates the growing potential of connected electronic health records, structured clinical data, artificial intelligence and digital health technologies.[3] [5]
For medical specialists, the long-term opportunity is significant. Instead of information being trapped within individual practices or healthcare organisations, the healthcare system can increasingly work towards making the right information available to the right healthcare professional at the right time.
The IHI is one of the foundations that makes that vision possible.
Why the IHI Matters for Medical Specialists
An Individual Healthcare Identifier is more than just a 16-digit number.
It is part of Australia’s national infrastructure for accurately identifying patients and connecting healthcare information across different providers and healthcare settings.
For medical specialists, this matters because modern healthcare rarely happens within a single practice. Patients move between GPs, specialists, hospitals, pathology providers, imaging services and other healthcare professionals throughout their care journey.
As healthcare becomes increasingly digital, the ability to accurately identify patients and exchange meaningful information will become increasingly important.
The future of healthcare is not simply about having more digital information. It is about making that information connected, accurate, secure and useful.
Learn more about how Zedmed supports Australian healthcare practices →
References
- Australian Government Department of Health, Disability and Ageing. Healthcare Identifiers and the Healthcare Identifiers Service. Australian Government. View resource →
- A Review of Current Patient Matching Techniques. Studies in Health Technology and Informatics. View study →
- El-Yafouri R, Klieb L. A scoping review of electronic health records interoperability levels, expectations, approaches, and problems. Health Informatics Journal. 2025. View study →
- Australian Digital Health Agency. My Health Record for healthcare providers. Australian Government. View resource →
- Shen Y, Yu J, Zhou J, Hu G. Twenty-Five Years of Evolution and Hurdles in Electronic Health Records and Interoperability in Medical Research: Comprehensive Review. Journal of Medical Internet Research. 2025;27:e59024. View study →
- Fennelly O, Moroney D, Doyle M, Eustace-Cook J, Hughes M. Key interoperability Factors for patient portals and Electronic health Records: A scoping review. International Journal of Medical Informatics. 2024;183:105335. View study →
- Cheah R, Manski-Nankervis JE, Thursky K, et al. Evaluating the Fitness for Purpose of Primary Care Data from Electronic Health Records for Automated Antimicrobial Prescribing Audits. Studies in Health Technology and Informatics. 2026. View study →
