The Australian healthcare community makes use of a number of different health identifiers – identifiers for patients, for doctors, allied health, individuals and organisations. These identifiers follow certain rules in their creation to ensure validity of an identifier’s format.
Healthcare software developers and healthcare providers often need to make test accounts for testing or demonstration purposes, and these accounts require health identifiers. Random strings of data that don’t follow these formats are likely rejected by quality software, making testing difficult. Often these users will resort to using their own personal identifiers for testing, potentially releasing their own private identifiers onto website they have no control over or having their identifiers appear in publicly accessible places.
Australian Health Identifiers allows a developer or healthcare provider to generate any number of random format-valid identifiers for testing or development purposes. It also provides the user with a means of testing the validity of an identifier, reflecting not only if the identifier is format-valid, but also the identifier type and other information that can be obtained from the identifier.
Australian Health Identifiers handles the following Australian health identifiers:
• Medicare Numbers
• Provider Numbers
• Prescriber Numbers
• Individual Health identifiers (IHI)
• Health Provider Identifier for Individuals (HPI-I)
• Health Provider Identifier for Organisations (HPI-O)
• Department of Veteran Affairs File Number (DVA)
• AHPRA Registration Number
The software can create large numbers of identifiers or individual identifiers, with visual representation to make it easier to recognise the identifiers source. It can also automatically copy these identifiers so they can be used in other software. It is available for iPhone, iPad and macOS.
Note: This tool generates random identifiers. It also verifies identifiers based on their format only; it does not verify with government services to check if an identifier belongs to a particular individual. Health identifiers should only be used for training, demonstration and testing purposes and must not be used for any other purpose.
