Health Connect Australia Provider Directory FHIR Implementation Guide, published by Australian Digital Health Agency. This guide is not an authorized publication; it is the continuous build for version 0.3.0-preview built by the FHIR (HL7® FHIR® Standard) CI Build. This version is based on the current content of https://github.com/AuDigitalHealth/HealthConnect/ and changes regularly. See the Directory of published versions
Health Connect Provider Directory is a searchable online database that stores healthcare provider information. When you need to find a doctor, clinic, or healthcare service, you can search by location, medical specialty, or availability, and the system returns detailed information including practitioner registration numbers, healthcare organisation details, physical addresses and contact information, and available services with booking details. This Implementation Guide provides the technical instructions for software developers to connect their healthcare systems to this centralised provider directory. Instead of manually calling offices or looking up provider details individually, healthcare software can automatically retrieve verified, up-to-date provider information from the national database. This eliminates duplicate data entry, reduces verification phone calls, and enables automated referral processes across Australia's healthcare system, making it easier for patients to access the right care at the right time.
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Official URL: http://digitalhealth.gov.au/fhir/hcpd/ImplementationGuide/au.gov.digitalhealth.r4.hcpd
Health Connect Provider Directory FHIR Implementation Guide
This material is under active development and content may be added or updated on a regular basis.
ADHA review feedback
We welcome your feedback on this implementation guide.
To contribute directly to this implementation guide with code changes or documentation updates, please fork the repository and submit a pull request.
For technical FHIR-related comments, implementation feedback, or suggestions for profile improvements, you can create a GitHub issue.
For feedback concerning design considerations, business requirements, or broader implementation strategy, please contact the Clinical Informatics team.
Scope
This Implementation Guide (IG) defines how a Health Connect Provider Directory Requester Actor (client) interacts with a Health Connect Provider Directory Responder Actor (server), specifying the expected behaviors for each. The Requester Actor is a read-only FHIR client: it may perform search and read operations, but does not create, update, or delete resources in Health Connect. The capability statements in this IG set out the minimum operations and behaviors that conformant implementations must support. For the Responder Actor, requirements are expressed as SHALL statements, indicating mandatory support. For the Requester Actor, requirements are a mix of SHALL (mandatory) and SHOULD (recommended) statements, as detailed in the relevant capability statements and conformance statement sections of this guide. For further detail please appraise both the capability statements and conformance statement.
Introduction
Health Connect Australia is a national health information exchange program designed to enable the sharing of health information between healthcare participants quickly and securely. By integrating advanced digital infrastructure, standards, privacy protections and enabling real-time data sharing, Health Connect Australia will support multidisciplinary collaboration across care settings. As a key enabler of the National Digital Health Strategy 2023–2028 and the National Healthcare Interoperability Plan 2023-2028, it ensures secure, connected digital solutions that improve access, efficiency and care quality-paving the way for a smarter, more integrated future in digital health. The program is being delivered in phases, beginning with foundational capabilities and expanding to support secure communication, record discovery, and value-added services for both providers and consumers.
The Directory and Authorisation Service Project is the first initiative under the Foundations phase. It enables healthcare providers to discover accurate, up-to-date information about other providers and the services they offer, while establishing a trust framework to support consistent and secure access to health information. By connecting provider data from multiple primary sources through a single access point and ensuring near real-time updates, the project lays the groundwork for broader interoperability and trusted information exchange across the national health ecosystem.
One of the key objectives of the Directory and Authorisation Service Project is to enable interoperability through contemporary standards-such as FHIR APIs-to ensure seamless integration across clinical and administrative systems. To support this, the project is establishing a centralised directory hosted on a FHIR repository, where provider and organisation data will be structured using HL7® FHIR® and terminology standards. To guide consistent implementation and promote national alignment, the project is developing a FHIR Implementation Guide that defines how provider information should be represented and exchanged. This guide will build on existing standards, including the HL7 Australia FHIR AU Core, and provide a clear reference for integrators and system vendors to support secure, scalable, and standards-compliant access to directory data.
How to read this guide
This guide is divided into several pages which are listed at the top of each page in the menu bar.
Home: This page provides the introduction and scope for the implementation guide.
Conformance: This page describes the set of rules to claim conformance to this guide including capability statements and actor definitions.
Guidance: This page provides implementation guidance and best practices for using the Health Connect Provider Directory FHIR IG.
General Guidance: This page provides implementation conventions for must support elements, actor obligations, and experimental dependencies in the Health Connect Provider Directory FHIR IG.
Bulk Data Extraction: This page provides asynchronous bulk export capabilities using FHIR Bulk Data Access specification for large-scale provider directory data extraction and synchronization.
Security and Privacy: This page provides Security requirements including TLS encryption standards, FHIR communications security, and privacy obligations for Health Connect Provider Directory implementations.
FHIR Artefacts: These pages provide detailed descriptions and formal definitions for all the FHIR artefacts defined in this guide.
Artifacts Summary: This page provides a comprehensive summary of all FHIR artifacts defined in this implementation guide including profiles, extensions, terminology, and other conformance resources.
Profiles and Extensions: This page lists the FHIR profiles and extensions that are defined in this guide.
Terminology: This page lists the FHIR terminology that are defined in this guide.
Capability Statements: This page defines the expected FHIR capabilities of Health Connect Provider Directory Requester and Health Connect Provider Directory Responder.
Search Parameters: This page lists the FHIR search parameters that are defined in this guide.
Actor Definitions: This page defines the Health Connect actors, Health Connect Provider Directory Requester and Health Connect Provider Directory Responder.
Examples: This page lists the sample instances of FHIR resources conforming to the FHIR profiles.
Support: This page provides links to downloadable artefacts including the Agency FHIR NPM package.
Change Log: This page documents the version history and changes made to this implementation guide across different releases.
Disclaimers: This page lists the licensing, copyright, and disclaimers under which this guide is issued.
Document purpose and scope
The primary aim of this implementation guide is to support implementers integrating with the Directory services using FHIR, Release 4 (v4.0.1) [HL7FHIR4]. It provides the technical specifications, FHIR profiles, and terminology definitions required for healthcare provider data exchange through Health Connect Provider Directory APIs.
This document describes specific system behaviours such as obligations, API HTTP response codes, and search parameters. Other system behavioural requirements such as the presentation of information and user experience are managed separately and must be met before systems can be assessed for conformance and granted access to Health Connect APIs.
Reference has been made to International and Australian Standards, and to Standards from HL7. The following standards are referred to in the text in such a way that some or all of its content constitutes requirements for the purposes of this specification:
Wherever possible, material in this specification is based on existing standards. All efforts have been made to minimise divergence from the HL7 Australia standards (AU Core [HL7AUCIG] and AU Base [HL7AUBIG]) to provide for system interoperability and compatibility with other profiles. Issues of an editorial nature in the source material (such as spelling or punctuation errors) are intentionally reproduced. For a list of known issues (see below).
Intended audience
This implementation guide is aimed at software development teams, architects, and designers that integrate with the Health Connect Provider Directory system.
This implementation guide and related artefacts are technical in nature and the audience is expected to be familiar with the language of health data specifications and to have some familiarity with health information standards and specifications, such as FHIR.
Relationships with other work
This implementation guide builds on other specifications, helping ensure a consistent approach to data sharing that should ease adoption. The specific guides used, and the portions relevant from each of them are as follows:
IG
Package
FHIR
Comment
Health Connect Australia Provider Directory FHIR Implementation Guide
The Health Connect Provider Directory uses FHIR resources to represent healthcare providers, their roles, organisational affiliations, service locations, and the healthcare services they provide. The diagram below illustrates the key relationships between these FHIR resources:
Practitioner - Individual healthcare providers with their professional qualifications and identifiers
Organization - Healthcare organisations and facilities that employ or affiliate with practitioners
HealthcareService - Specific services offered by organisations at locations
Location - Physical or virtual locations where healthcare services are delivered
Endpoint - Technical endpoints for digital service integration and communication
This model supports complex healthcare delivery scenarios while maintaining FHIR R4 compliance and enabling efficient provider directory searches and integrations.
Known issues
This table lists known issues with this specification at the time of publishing. We are working on solutions to these issues and encourage comments to help us develop these solutions.
Reference
Description
Example system URI
An inherited example system (e.g. http://www.acme.com/identifiers/patient) erroneously infers patient context. Implementers must use their own namespace URIs. The affected identifier profile is Endpoint (HC-EPI) - this profile includes the erroneous example `system` in their documentation.
AU Core Constraint failed
The au-core-org-01 constraint currently only recognizes HPI-O and PAI-O as valid NOI identifiers, HSP-O support will be added to au-core in a future release. This validation error is expected and does not affect the core functionality of the HSP-O identifier profile. Constraint failed: au-core-org-01: 'A National Organisation Identifier (type=NOI) shall be an HPI-O or PAI-O (type.coding.where(code='NOI').exists() implies ((system='http://ns.electronichealth.net.au/id/hi/hpio/1.0') or (system='http://ns.electronichealth.net.au/id/pcehr/paio/1.0')))' (defined in http://hl7.org.au/fhir/core/StructureDefinition/au-core-organization|2.0.0)
