Digital Channel Upgrades at Services Australia
Services Australia are upgrading their digital health and aged care channels. These upgrades will ensure their systems are secure and using up-to-date industry standard technology. The changes will provide greater security to patient and provider information and will protect Australia’s health and aged care information, now and into the future.
The channels being upgraded will see adaptor technology replaced with web services technology and will be moved from Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) security to a local authentication system called Provider Digital Access (PRODA). PKI security is the authentication technology currently used to submit claiming and data information to Services Australia.
The channels impacted are:
- Medicare Online
- Immunisation Register - via Medicare Online
- Department of Veterans’ Affairs - via Medicare Online
- ECLIPSE
- PBS Online Australian
- Aged Care web services
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.
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. We’re working with software developers to make sure software products are fully tested before becoming available.
You will have already recieved notice of these changes by letter between November 2019 and February 2020. More information, including fact sheets for each channel impacted, will be available in the coming weeks. These will detail the next steps to take for each channel you use. Organisations using any of these channels will need to update their existing software to web services compatible software before March 2022.
For more information view Web Services: July 2020 Update or visit the Services Australia website.
Please direct any questions via email to Services Australia.