PIE FAQ

Regularly checking the national Register of practitioners is an important way for employers to reduce risk and ensure safer practice. The Practitioner Information Exchange (PIE) allows approved healthcare organisations to easily check the details and registration status of the health practitioners they employ. A PIE browser subscriber can receive alerts about changes to a practitioner’s details or registration status via PIE Alerts, which is updated every 24 hours.

The PIE service is available to organisations that:

• directly employ health practitioners, such as public and private hospitals, aged care services and medical and allied health services
• offer services to or receive services from employers of practitioners
• provide a service to the health care industry, or
• have a legislative or compliance obligation to ensure they are only providing services or information to registered practitioners.

Our suite of PIE services can help you to: 

• Manage the professional registration status for a diverse workforce: Ensuring employees, consultants and associates are always working within their registration conditions, which may change as practitioners upgrade their capabilities, or have new restrictions imposed on them.  
• Support agility in business: Ensuring all resources are co-ordinated and using common identity data across human resources, clinical management, IT and finance systems to prevent re-work, streamline systems and build new capabilities.  
• Mitigate operational risk: Make sure up to date and accurate information about the registration status of health practitioners is available to the people who need it. Often, this is the people managing or working directly with health practitioners. This helps manage organisational risk and cuts costs.  
• Manage compliance: with Australian privacy regulations through managed processes and traceable records. 

No, Ahpra branding cannot be used on your software or materials without Ahpra consent.

Yes, overseas users can access the PIE platform subject to approval by Ahpra’s Data Exchange management. Please note certain conditions must be met.

No. Organisations approved to use PIE are permitted to use the data for internal purposes only.

PIE only provides data that is available on the Public Register as is specified in Section 225 of the Health Practitioner Regulation National Law Act, 2009. The nature of the information provided on the National Register is not of the nature or detail that would make it usable by direct marketing or other similar professions. Ahpra will not provide any contact details, such as phone numbers or email address.

The PIE API services are RESTful APIs hosted by Ahpra and are triggered by the data customer. The Ahpra registration number is a required input to query the API service and Browser. SOAP UI is the application recommended for API integration; however, some organisations have utilised Postman. API responses are returned in XML format. If you have further questions, please contact us to discuss.

Data is refreshed every 24 hours. Please note that information published on Ahpra’s Public Register is refreshed approximately every 15 mins and is the most up to date source of information.

Technical documents and support are provided once a customer has been onboarded.

Healthcare organisations have a responsibility to protect health services and consumers by keeping up-to-date information about of their employee’s registration status. Users of the PIE service can access information in bulk, automating or streamlining their compliance activities. 

Data exchange partnerships are important contributors to protecting the public by ensuring and verifying that only practitioners who are suitably trained, qualified, and currently registered, are employed. PIE data supports organisations to verify their practitioners are always working within their registration conditions and scope of practice, which may change as practitioners upgrade their capabilities, or have new restrictions imposed on them.

PIE fees and charges are based on a cost recovery model for the provision of PIE services. For this reason, Ahpra offers standardised services with standardised terms and conditions related to data usage.

The federal Department of Finance (DoF) has issued Cost Recovery guidelines¹. These guidelines outline which specified government programs should be able to demonstrate their compliance with the cost recovery principles of economic efficiency, design principles, operational principles and efficiency principles.

The use of a cost recovery model is appropriate as PIE is a significant program cost and has a number of stakeholders who may be materially affected by PIE. Also, PIE revenue will be redirected into further development of the PIE platform and future services so the costing model needs to be effective generating the revenue required.

The PIE program is a good example of a non-rivalrous public good, in that one data partners’ use of the service does not diminish the value of the service to other data partners. In such cases, selecting the most appropriate cost recovery model simplifies the service establishment and simplifies engagement with stakeholders.

¹Australian Government Cost Recovery Guidelines, accessed 10 Sept 2013 (link updated 8 October 2019 to 2014 edition)

Invoices are issued on the date which the customer’s PIE service is set up, and on the anniversary set up date each year thereafter. For each annual invoice, we ask you to estimate your expected data use. The estimate should be approximately the number of practitioners in your employ which you are monitoring/searching. For example, if you are checking the registration of 500 unique health practitioners per year then your data estimate would be $500. You are only ever charged for the data you use. Any data used above your estimated amount is charged to your next invoice, while any data usage below the estimate is credited back to you on your next invoice.

PIE uses secure https connections to control communications between Ahpra and data partners. PIE databases are run entirely within Ahpra’s secure IT environment. Data partners are responsible to ensure their PIE username and password are held securely and to request Ahpra provide a new password should they think their PIE account has been compromised.

Yes, but only authorised users can update sub-account names, alert group names and email addresses using the PIE browser account. Please contact [email protected] to advise of any changes in contact or user information.