Ahpra telehealth guidelines: what the Medical Board expects

The guiding principle is simple: telehealth is held to the same professional and ethical standards as in-person care. The Medical Board of Australia’s Guidelines: Telehealth consultations with patients — in effect since 1 September 2023 — spell out what “good practice” looks like on video or phone, and the recurring theme is that the standard of care does not drop just because the patient is on a screen (Medical Board of Australia).

This is a practical run-through of what the guidelines expect and how to meet them in a normal working week. It is general information, not legal advice — always check the current guideline for your profession.

Same standard of care, different medium

The starting point is that a telehealth consultation must be safe and, as far as possible, meet the same standard of care as an in-person consultation (Medical Board of Australia). Telehealth is a way of delivering care, not a lower tier of it. Your usual obligations around competence, assessment, consent, privacy and follow-up all carry across.

Ahpra frames this from the other direction: practitioners can use telehealth where they are appropriately skilled and competent, where it is safe and clinically appropriate for the service being provided, and where it is suitable for the patient (Ahpra). If any of those three tests fails, telehealth is the wrong tool for that encounter.

The through-line in every version of the guidance is accountability: the individual practitioner — not the employer, the platform or the booking service — is responsible for the healthcare provided via telehealth. Convenience never lowers the bar.

Who the guidelines apply to

The Telehealth consultations with patients guidelines are issued by the Medical Board and apply to registered medical practitioners. Other professions are governed by their own National Board’s codes and standards, but the underlying expectation — same standards online as in person — is consistent across Ahpra’s regulated professions (Ahpra). The RACGP also publishes a useful summary of the Medical Board and Ahpra position for GPs (RACGP).

So whatever your discipline, check your own board’s guidance — but expect the principles below to apply.

Confirm identity and who else is present

Before you get into the clinical content, confirm to the best of your ability the identity of the patient and of anyone else in the room, on both ends of the call (Medical Board of Australia). Ask where the patient is physically located, and take a call-back number in case the connection drops. Knowing the location matters clinically too — if you need to escalate, you want to know which emergency service to direct them to.

Checking who else is present is not a formality. It shapes what the patient will disclose and what you should say aloud, and it may be relevant to consent where a carer or family member is participating.

Get informed consent

Apply the usual principles for obtaining informed consent, and add the telehealth-specific layer: the patient should understand that a remote assessment has limitations, and agree to proceed on that basis (Medical Board of Australia). Document that you obtained consent. We cover this in more depth in informed consent for telehealth.

Judge clinical appropriateness

The guidelines are explicit that telehealth is not suitable for every presentation. You need enough information to make safe clinical decisions, and where that requires a hands-on or internal examination — or where the problem could be serious and high-risk — a face-to-face review is the safer path. Build a low threshold for converting to an in-person appointment, and tell the patient that is always an option. For the detail, see when telehealth is not appropriate.

Prescribe only after a real-time consultation

Prescribing attracts specific attention in the current guidelines, largely in response to the growth of questionnaire-only online prescribing services. The Board’s position is that prescribing or providing healthcare for a patient without a real-time direct consultation — whether in person, by video or by telephone — is not good practice (Medical Board of Australia). Asynchronous requests based solely on an online questionnaire, with no real-time interaction, do not meet the standard (Medical Board of Australia).

In practice: a real-time video or phone consultation is the foundation for any prescribing decision, and you should apply the same care you would in person — more so for higher-risk medicines, controlled drugs, or first-time prescriptions where an examination would normally be indicated. Document your reasoning.

Keep good records

Document a telehealth consult as thoroughly as any other, plus a few extras the guidelines call out: the type of technology used (video or phone), any technical problems that affected the consult, who was present, that consent was obtained, and — if the consultation is recorded at all — consent from all participants to that recording (Medical Board of Australia). Note any limitations of the remote assessment and your safety-netting advice. Our telehealth documentation guide goes through this in detail.

Your platform is part of meeting the standard

The guidelines don’t mandate a specific product, but they do expect the technology to be fit for clinical purposes, with image and sound quality good enough to support your assessment, and handling of information that satisfies privacy law. That is a reason most clinics use purpose-built telehealth software rather than a consumer video app.

A good tool also removes the practical failure modes that get in the way of a safe consult — a patient who can’t join, or a call that keeps dropping. MedCall is built for this: it’s made for Australian clinicians, patients join by tapping a texted link with no app or account, and it’s Australian-hosted and never recorded, with 1:1 calls end-to-end encrypted. Your booking, notes and billing stay in your existing practice software, where they belong.

The bottom line

The Ahpra and Medical Board telehealth guidelines don’t reinvent good medicine — they insist on it in a new medium. Deliver the same standard of care, confirm identity and who’s present, get and document consent, only offer telehealth where it’s clinically appropriate, prescribe only after a real-time consultation, and keep thorough records. When you’re unsure, the safest move is almost always to bring the patient in. For the authoritative text, read the Medical Board’s Telehealth consultations with patients guidelines in full, and check your own National Board for anything profession-specific.