Department of Human Services Upgrade to Digital Health and Aged Care Channels

The Department of Human Services delivers services and payments on behalf of the Department of Health and the Department of Veterans’ Affairs (DVA) for the Medicare Benefits Scheme, Australian Immunisation Register, the Pharmaceutical Benefit Scheme and Aged Care.

In the 2017-18 Budget, the Department of Human Services received funding to enhance, stabilise and consolidate the existing health and aged care payments channels.

The Department’s vision is to deliver secure and up-to-date industry standard technology to protect Australia’s health and aged care information, now and into the future.

To do this, the Department will upgrade the following channels:

• Medicare Online
• Australian Immunisation Register - via Medicare Online
• Department of Veterans’ Affairs - via Medicare Online
• ECLIPSE
• PBS Online
• Aged Care

Existing Client Adaptor, Enterprise Server Adaptor and Server Adaptor technology will be replaced with web services technology.

The above channels will also be moved from Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) security and be replaced with an authentication system called Provider Digital Access (PRODA). This change won’t impact organisations using a NASH PKI certificate for healthcare provider organisations to authenticate to the Healthcare Identifiers Services and the My Health Record system.

From late November 2019, all health and aged care professionals can expect to receive communication from the Department of Human Services either by letter or email, advising them of the upgrades and their next steps.

What this means for you

Organisations using any of these channels may need to update their existing software to web services compatible software. They’ll need to do this before March 2022.

Depending on their software design, organisations or their chosen software provider may need to access these channels using PRODA. They may also need to upgrade their hardware to work with the updated software.

The Department of Human Services is working with software developers to make sure software products are fully tested before becoming available. Their new products could start to become available from late 2019.

More information
For more information and for regular updates go to humanservices.gov.au/hpwebservices