A directory of health services and providers has been identified as critical core infrastructure by Health Departments across Australia and eB2Bcom View500 is a provider to, or in serious negotiations with, 3 such Departments for the provision of a Health Service Providers Directory (HSPD.) The need for a comprehensive, trusted HSPD is driven firstly by the requirement of Departments (and potentially the general population) to identify and contact relevant service providers quickly and efficiently, including in times of emergency. It is also an underpinning requirement for any eHealth initiative such as Electronic referrals and discharges. Ultimately, when coupled with a national Patient Directory, the complete identity infrastructure required for the “holy grail” of the health industry, the Electronic Health Record, results. The primary goal of the HSPD is to deliver a business and information framework solution required to support electronic referrals across all the State health service providers. These providers include those agencies that receive funding from Department and those agencies or organisations that do not receive funding but nonetheless deliver health services. Effectively the HSPD provides a fundamental infrastructure base for the delivery of integrated ‘Health Services’ across the state. Provide a key building block (business and information) that will enable the future linking of all participants within the public and private ‘Health Services’ sector. It can also provide the basis for a Statewide e-Referral network.

A trusted HSPD provides, or is the framework for, many of the current State and National Health initiatives. These capabilities include:
• a web access point for consumers that will list all health services and providers with authenticated access by authorised staff to restricted data
• controlled interface to, or synchronising with, data of other Departments, States, and National projects, such as Health Connect and the National NEHTA initiatives.
• a core enabler for Electronic Referrals/Discharges
• storage of digital certificate keys for PKI based systems such as secure email or two factor authentication
• Storage of trusted data of health professionals and other parties for broadcast systems such as epidemics
• the basis for Electronic Health Record systems where the interests and concerns of local health stakeholders can be reconciled with national standards and requirements
• the location for a common provider list being used across solutions to ensure consistent provider identification in referrals.
The benefits of a successful HSPD are:
• improved efficiencies in the search and selection of health service provider information
• improvement in the quality of health service provider data
• improvement in the public’s perception of efficiency in health service organisations
• improvement in access to health service provider information
• rationalisation of the sources of health service provider information
• reduction in the requirement for health service provider information searches
• elimination of the need to perform multiple searches for health service provider information

From our experience and observations, it is regrettably apparent that inadequate “vanilla” database or LDAP technology has been chosen to supply the directory requirements. These do not have the specific facilities essential for success of an HSPD – for example the ability for simple “machinery-of-government changes to cope with the frequent re-organisations of departments, regions, hospitals, the user friendly client focussed searching capabilities etc.
The technology used must meet the specific service needs of the proposed users. This includes:
• high speed access
• integration with web services and the ability to store XML data and more importantly to be able to search on its content
• high quality approximate matching, phonetic searching
• component matching (for more complex searches)
• hierarchical schemas to match departmental and hospital structures
• facility for “machinery-of-government” changes
• strong authentication and support for protection of data content to support State Privacy requirements