Medical Record systems like Best Practice and Medical Director use NASH PKI certificates to access services such as My Health Record and electronic Prescribing. Staff responsible for managing these certificates need to take note of enhancements being made to the certificates and the actions they will need to take before their NASH certificates expire.

The National Authentication Service for Health (NASH) is a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) solution used to authenticate and securely access digital health services, digitally sign documents and other transactions and encrypt health information for secure exchange. NASH certificates are used to enable access to digital health services such as: 

  • My Health Record
  • Electronic Prescribing 
  • Secure Messaging 
  • Healthcare Identifiers (HI) Service 

The NASH certificate is being enhanced to provide improved security protection for healthcare information and reduce the need for healthcare organisations to manage multiple certificates. Your current NASH certificate is known as SHA-1 and the new enhanced certificate is known as SHA-2. 

For you to be able to use the NASH SHA-2 certificates your medical software that gives you access to My Health Record and the HI Service etc will need to be upgraded. To find out if your software vendor is SHA-2 ready, check the readiness register or contact your software vendor. 

The questions below will help you plan for what you need to do: 

  1. Does your existing NASH (SHA-1) certificate expire before 13 March 2022?
  2. Is your medical record software NASH SHA-2 ready?

If you answered 'No' to question one and your NASH SHA-1 certificate expires on or after 14 March 2022, no action is required. Further information will be provided at a later date.

If you answer 'Yes' to both questions, you can now obtain an upgraded NASH SHA-2 certificate in Health Professional Online Services (HPOS).

If you answered 'No' to question two you can obtain a new NASH SHA-1 certificate which will be valid for two years. This will allow you to transition to NASH SHA-2 at a later date.

Before logging into HPOS to request a new NASH certificate, check the register to see if your software product is SHA-2 ready and contact your software vendor for further guidance. 

The ACRRM Digital Health team can be contacted at ehealth@acrrm.org.au.