Claiming
The Claiming services allow health professionals and healthcare locations to submit Medicare and DVA (Department of Veterans’ Affairs) medical claims electronically to Services Australia. DVA covers eligible Australian veterans and their dependants. Rather than using a Medicare card, patients are identified by a DVA file number, and the benefit is paid by the Department of Veterans’ Affairs instead of Medicare.
RebateRight supports two Medicare claim flows (below) and DVA medical claiming for eligible veterans. See the DVA claiming card.
The patient assigns their right to Medicare benefits to the health professional. The claim is lodged on their behalf, with payment going directly to the provider.
The patient retains their right to Medicare benefits. The claim is lodged on their behalf, with Medicare benefit paid directly to the patient.
For eligible veterans and dependants covered by the Department of Veterans’ Affairs. Includes veteran verification, general / specialist / pathology medical claims, processing and payment reports, and the treatment service voucher (PDF).
Common Concepts
The two Medicare claim flows share the same building blocks:
About the Correlation ID
Services Australia refers to this value as dhs-correlationId in requests, and as “Transaction Id” in its reason-code messages. You may see either term.
- Format: exactly 33 characters, being the literal prefix
urn:uuid:, then the clinic’s 8-character Minor ID, then 16 characters of your own (e.g.urn:uuid:MDE00000b896820b03e348a5). Despite the prefix, this is not a standard UUID, and a plain UUID is rejected. - Auto-generated: RebateRight generates one for you if your request omits the field. You can still supply your own, for example, to correlate the claim with an identifier in your own system for end-to-end tracing.
- Same ID = resubmission: reuse the same
correlationIdto resubmit a corrected version of the same claim, or to pend a pendable claim. - New ID = new claim: use a fresh
correlationIdfor every genuinely new claim. Reusing one from a previous claim is rejected by Medicare as a duplicate transaction.
DVA claiming follows a similar voucher-and-services model, but patients are identified with a DVA file number and related veteran fields.
Before You Begin
Claiming requires a Minor ID to be registered with Services Australia before you can submit claims. See the Minor ID Setup guide for instructions.
Ensure you have completed:
- Minor ID registration via the HW027 form with Services Australia
- Practitioners linked to the Minor ID (call Medicare eBusiness on 1800 700 199)
- EFT bank details registered with Services Australia for Bulk Bill payment
Retrieving Outcomes
Claiming is store-and-forward. A 200 means Medicare accepted the claim for processing, not that it has assessed it, so the outcome arrives separately through a processing report.
A bulk bill claim’s report becomes available the day after lodgement. Schedule a daily retrieval from that point: a report requested on the day you submit returns REPORT_NOT_READY.
Availability
Production accepts claims around the clock, so an evening or overnight batch is a supported pattern. Services Australia runs these services to its published service level standards, with scheduled maintenance outages for deployments and system housekeeping. Typical responses are under four seconds, though no response time is guaranteed, and no rate limit is imposed.
The test environment is different, and its behaviour is not a preview of production. See Integration test data for what to expect outside AEST business hours there.
Implementation Note
It is a requirement by Services Australia that error messages are displayed to the end user exactly as supplied in the response, not truncated, transformed, or changed in any way. These messages may be updated at any time.