Health Identity Programme

The Ministry of Health is undertaking a major upgrade of New Zealand's health identity systems. Through the Health Identity Programme (HIP), the 20-year-old technology supporting the two main health identity databases, National Health Index (NHI) and the Health Practitioner Index (HPI), is being replaced with a single integrated system.

The Health Identity Programme's work focuses on the 'behind-the-scenes' technology that supports these indexes and lays the foundation for:

• the national health identity databases having enhanced functions and web services
• a single source of truth for Patient, Provider and Address data for use by health providers
• new and accurate standardised address and geospatial data, from databases such as NZ Post, Land Information NZ, Statistics NZ and the Ministry of Health
• the ability for clinicians to securely access, update and share patient identity information
• multiple health sector agencies being able to update key identity information as and when they need to
• the future ability for near real-time patient enrolment by primary health organisation
• people to electronically access their own health records in the future.

Health Identity and the NHI and HPI systems

The Patient (NHI) and Practitioner (CPN) Index numbers, held in the current National Health Index (NHI) or the Health Practitioner Index (HPI) systems, will not change.

In the new integrated system, NHI and HPI data elements have been reviewed and some data changes have been made.

Our overall goal is to create a reliable, responsive system that enables all health sector systems to 'talk to each other'. We are the first country in the world to develop a national technological solution to do this. This requires all parts of the health sector to work together.

New Zealand is also a world leader in developing unique identifiers (NHI) to facilitate the safe sharing of health information. Ninety-eight per cent of our population now have an NHI number.

Find out more:

• The reasons for changing the health identity systems
• Information for Health Consumers/Patients
• Information for District Health Boards
• Information for Responsible Authorities
• Information for GPs and Primary Health Organisations
• Information for IT Health Vendors or IT Managers
• Progress Summary 
• Frequently Asked Questions

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