Research Australia Response to the Health Identifiers Review

This response to the Department of Health’s Health Identifiers Review, which aims to increase the use of healthcare identifiers across the health system, seeks an amendment to the Healthcare Identifiers Act to permit the identifiers to be used when preparing datasets for research. Research Australia maintains that section 14 of the Act is too narrow: it allows only healthcare providers to disclose an individual’s identifier, only for ethics-approved research conducted to provide healthcare, and does not cover provider or organisation identifiers. This excludes research on prescribing trends, care pathways, disease incidence or prevention, and universities, research institutes and companies would not meet the proposed definition of a healthcare administration entity. It recommends that use of all three identifiers for creating, collating and linking research datasets be an explicitly permitted purpose, leaving data-sharing decisions to frameworks such as the Data Availability and Transparency Act 2022.