Oct 5, 2025
6
min read
Medically Reviewed
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The Telehealth Revolution and Its Aftermath
The introduction of Medicare Benefits Schedule telehealth item numbers in March 2020 fundamentally changed the delivery model of Australian general practice. Within weeks, consultations that had been conducted face to face for the entire history of Australian medicine moved to video and phone, and both clinicians and patients discovered that a significant proportion of primary care — perhaps as much as one-third of all consultations — could be delivered effectively without the patient being physically present in the practice. The RACGP estimates that at the peak of the pandemic, telehealth accounted for a substantial share of all GP consultations, and the vast majority of patients who used telehealth reported satisfaction with the experience and a preference for retaining access to the option.
The post-pandemic settlement has been a hybrid model in which telehealth remains a permanent fixture of Australian general practice, funded through ongoing MBS item numbers, but sits alongside face-to-face care rather than replacing it. The practices that have integrated telehealth most successfully are those that treat it as a seamless channel within the clinical workflow rather than as a separate activity requiring separate booking processes, separate technology and separate documentation. When the same platform handles the telehealth call, documents the consultation with the ambient AI scribe, and feeds the data into the billing and care plan systems, the distinction between telehealth and in-person care becomes nearly invisible to both the clinician and the patient, and the practice captures the efficiency and access benefits without the operational overhead that a disconnected telehealth solution would impose.
The next frontier for telehealth in Australia is not the technology itself — video consultation platforms are mature and widely available — but the integration of telehealth into the broader care pathway. The AI that documents the in-person consultation should document the telehealth consultation in exactly the same way. The billing assistant that captures the item numbers should handle telehealth and face-to-face consultations identically. The patient education material generated after the consultation should be delivered through the patient’s preferred channel regardless of the consultation modality. MediQo’s Smart Telehealth module, with the scribe embedded and the patient record on the same screen, represents the direction the entire sector is moving toward as the artificial distinction between telehealth and in-person care continues to dissolve.
My Health Record: Foundation or Frustration?
My Health Record is Australia’s national digital health record system, and with the opt-out model implemented in 2018, it now has a registered record for the vast majority of the population. In principle, it provides the foundation for a connected healthcare system in which a patient’s key clinical information — medications, allergies, diagnoses, immunisation history, advance care directives — is available to any authorised provider regardless of where the patient presents for care. The vision is ambitious and important, and My Health Record has delivered genuine benefits in emergency settings and for patients who travel frequently between different care providers across state and territory boundaries.
In practice, however, the depth and timeliness of My Health Record data remain inconsistent. Many clinical documents are uploaded with significant delays, some key data categories are populated inconsistently across different systems, and the clinical workflow integration that would make My Health Record a natural part of every consultation rather than an extra step that clinicians must remember to perform is still evolving. GPs who have to log into a separate portal to view the record, or who find that the information they need has not been uploaded, naturally develop a sceptical attitude toward a system that adds effort without reliably delivering value in return.
The path forward for My Health Record lies not in expanding its scope but in deepening its integration. When the practice’s clinical system automatically uploads a shared health summary at the conclusion of each consultation, when the hospital’s discharge summary appears in the GP’s workflow without any manual action, and when the AI layer that supports clinical decision-making draws on My Health Record data as a matter of course rather than as a special case, the national record infrastructure will fulfil its potential. This is ultimately a platform and interoperability challenge rather than a policy one, and it is the same challenge that the broader digital health ecosystem is working to solve through FHIR-based data exchange and connected clinical systems.
Expert Tips
"Australia has built the digital health foundations — the My Health Record, telehealth item numbers, secure messaging — but we are still treating them as separate pieces rather than as components of a single system. The next phase of digital health is not about adding more digital tools; it is about connecting the ones we already have so that information flows to the point of care without being pushed by human effort." — Arash Zohuri, CEO, MediQo
Consumer Expectations Drive Practice Investment
The most powerful driver of digital health adoption in Australian general practice is not government policy or technology vendor marketing — it is the expectations of patients. Australian consumers interact with digital services in every other domain of their lives with a level of convenience, speed and personalisation that was unimaginable a decade ago. They expect the same from their healthcare providers, and they are increasingly willing to choose a practice based on the quality of its digital experience rather than solely on geography or clinical reputation, creating competitive pressure that is reshaping the market for primary care services across metropolitan and regional Australia.
This expectation manifests in specific demands. Patients want to book appointments through their preferred channel at any hour, not just when the reception desk is staffed. They want to receive test results and recall reminders through secure digital communication rather than waiting for a phone call during business hours. They want the option of a telehealth consultation when a face-to-face visit is not necessary, without the process feeling clunky or second-best. Each of these expectations represents a technology investment for the practice — an AI receptionist, a patient portal, an integrated telehealth platform — and the practices that make these investments are building a competitive advantage that becomes more pronounced with each passing year as consumer expectations continue to rise across every demographic group and geographic region.
Importantly, meeting these expectations does not require a large IT budget or a dedicated technology team. The platform approach that combines AI telephony, AI documentation, AI billing and patient communication into a single connected system delivers the digital experience patients expect while reducing rather than increasing the complexity of the practice’s technology stack. The practice that adopts a connected platform solves multiple patient experience challenges simultaneously, and the integration between the modules means that the data captured by one function enriches all the others in a way that standalone point solutions can never achieve, creating a compounding return on the initial technology investment.
Key Takeaways
Australia's digital health journey has accelerated significantly since the widespread adoption of telehealth during the pandemic.
My Health Record provides a national foundation but real-time interoperability remains the next frontier.
Consumer expectations for digital access are driving practice-level investment in connected health technology.
AI-powered platforms that connect clinical, billing and communication functions are becoming the new standard.
Australia's digital health landscape has transformed more in the past five years than in the two decades that preceded them. The COVID-19 pandemic acted as a forced experiment in digital care delivery, compressing years of potential adoption into months and permanently altering the expectations of both patients and providers. Telehealth, which had been the subject of policy discussion and pilot programmes for years, became a mainstream care modality almost overnight, and the infrastructure that supported it — video consultation platforms, secure messaging, digital triage tools — was built and deployed at a speed that would have seemed impossible in the pre-pandemic environment of cautious pilot programmes and gradual rollout strategies.
Yet the picture is uneven. While some practices and health services have embraced digital tools and integrated them into the core of their operations, others have adopted the minimum required to maintain access to telehealth item numbers and no more. My Health Record has achieved broad registration coverage but the depth of its use in clinical workflows varies enormously, and the promised interoperability that would allow seamless data exchange across general practice, hospital, allied health and aged care remains more aspiration than reality on the ground for the majority of clinicians navigating multiple disconnected systems in their daily work.
This article examines the current state of digital health in Australia, the progress that has been made and the gaps that remain. It looks at the key building blocks — My Health Record, telehealth, consumer expectations and interoperability — and considers what the next phase of digital health adoption will look like, particularly for general practices that are deciding where to invest their technology budget for maximum impact on patient experience and practice efficiency.
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