The future of telehealth in Australia: where it's heading

The future of telehealth in Australia isn’t about whether it survives — that’s settled. It’s about how deeply it becomes woven into a connected digital-health system. Telehealth is now permanent, and the interesting questions are what surrounds it: shared records, electronic prescriptions, better data, and eventually more remote monitoring.

Here’s where the direction of travel actually points, based on what the government and the Australian Digital Health Agency are building.

From temporary to permanent

The first thing to understand about telehealth’s future is that its foundation is no longer in doubt. What began as emergency pandemic measures has been made an ongoing part of the health system, with Medicare-supported video and phone consultations available as standard (Department of Health, Disability and Ageing). That permanency is the platform everything else is built on: clinicians can invest in telehealth workflows knowing they aren’t temporary, and patients can rely on it being there.

If you want the numbers behind how established it already is, see our telehealth statistics for Australia.

The connective tissue: a national digital health strategy

Telehealth doesn’t advance in isolation. It’s one thread in the Australian Digital Health Agency’s National Digital Health Strategy (2023–2028), whose stated vision is “creating an inclusive, sustainable and healthier future for all Australians through a connected and digitally enabled health system” (Australian Digital Health Agency).

The strategy organises its work around a few outcomes that matter directly for telehealth:

• Digitally enabled — connected, safe, secure and sustainable health services
• Person-centred — giving people the information and tools to manage their own care
• Inclusive — equitable access to services when and where they’re needed
• Data-driven — better data to inform decisions at every level

(Australian Digital Health Agency)

The through-line is connection. The future of telehealth is less about a better video window and more about that video consult plugging into everything else — your record, your prescriptions, your results — so remote care is as informed as in-person care.

The next phase of telehealth won’t be won on video quality. It’ll be won on integration: whether a remote consult can draw on your full history and feed cleanly back into it. The call is the easy part; the connected record around it is the hard part.

Shared records: My Health Record

A remote clinician is only as good as the information they can see. That’s why My Health Record matters so much to telehealth’s future. It’s a national digital record that brings together key health information — prescription and dispensing details, pathology and diagnostic imaging reports, medicines and test or scan results — accessible to both the person and their authorised clinicians across different providers (Australian Digital Health Agency).

For telehealth, that closes a real gap. A clinician seeing a patient remotely — perhaps one they don’t usually see — can check recent results and medicines rather than working blind. As record-sharing deepens, the historical weakness of remote care (limited context) steadily shrinks.

Electronic prescriptions, already routine

One part of the “future” is already here. Electronic prescriptions turn a paper script into a digital token sent by SMS or email, which a pharmacy scans to dispense — and the Active Script List lets a patient manage all their scripts and repeats in one place rather than juggling individual tokens (Australian Digital Health Agency).

eScripts and telehealth fit together naturally: there’s no point having a remote consult if the patient then has to collect a paper script in person. Expect this integration to keep tightening, with prescribing, dispensing and records increasingly joined up. We explain the mechanics in electronic prescriptions (eScripts) explained.

Remote monitoring and connected care

The more forward-looking direction is remote patient monitoring — home blood-pressure cuffs, glucose meters, pulse oximeters and wearables feeding data back to a care team between consults. It aligns squarely with the strategy’s goal of a “connected and digitally enabled health system” and its emphasis on person-centred, self-managed care (Australian Digital Health Agency).

This is genuinely emerging rather than settled, and it will develop unevenly — constrained by device access, connectivity and how monitoring is funded. But the logic is strong for chronic disease, where continuous data beats a snapshot taken every few months. Over time, expect the line between “a telehealth appointment” and “ongoing remote care” to blur.

What it means for clinicians — and for software

For clinicians, the trajectory is reassuring: telehealth is permanent, better supported by shared records, and increasingly connected to prescribing and monitoring. The practical implication is to build telehealth into normal workflows rather than treating it as a bolt-on.

It also clarifies what to look for in a telehealth tool. As the ecosystem gets more connected, the video platform itself should stay focused and secure — do one job well and stay out of the way of the record and billing systems that do the rest. That’s the philosophy behind MedCall: made for Australian clinicians, Australian-hosted and never recorded, with patients joining by a texted link and no app or account. The connected future works better when the consult layer is simple, private and reliable, leaving records and prescribing to the national systems built for them.

What’s still to be worked out

None of this is guaranteed to be smooth. A few real questions will shape how quickly the vision arrives:

• Interoperability. A connected system only works if records, prescribing tools and consult platforms actually talk to each other. Getting different systems to share data cleanly is a persistent, unglamorous challenge.
• Funding models. Remote monitoring and longer, more complex telehealth care need funding arrangements that keep pace. How these are supported through Medicare will heavily influence what clinicians can offer.
• Equity. As telehealth becomes more sophisticated, the risk is that people without reliable internet, suitable devices or digital confidence fall further behind. A genuinely inclusive future has to design for them, not around them.

These aren’t reasons for pessimism — they’re the practical work between here and the destination. The direction is set; the pace depends on how well these are handled.

The bottom line

The future of telehealth in Australia is one of integration, not reinvention. Its place is permanent; the National Digital Health Strategy is knitting it into a connected system; My Health Record is closing the information gap; eScripts already join consults to pharmacies; and remote monitoring is the emerging frontier for chronic care. The video call will matter less on its own and more as part of a joined-up whole. For the government’s roadmap, read the National Digital Health Strategy.