The Australian Digital Health Agency (ADHA) hopes to be able to simplify the National Authentication Service for Health (NASH) certificate renewal process following the move to new security standards on March 13 next year.

All security and authentication certificates from that date will be issued as secure hash algorithm 2 (SHA-2) certificates, in line with the mandate from the Digital Transformation Agency (DTA).

The change will mean healthcare organisations must be using SHA-2 compatible software. If they don’t, it will affect their software’s interfaces with the My Health Record, the Healthcare Identifiers Service, secure messaging services and other applications that require secure digital signatures, such as electronic prescribing.