Telstra Health named APAC Company of the Year by Frost & Sullivan. Learn more.
Australia’s digital health foundations are increasingly coming together. The opportunity now is to put them to work – connecting information with the context needed to support better decisions and experiences of care.
Australia has spent decades digitising healthcare.
That work has created important foundations. National infrastructure, standards and policy are evolving, technology has advanced and expectations of a more connected health system continue to grow.
But digitisation and connected care are not the same thing.
As Telstra Health Chief Technology Officer Farhoud Salimi recently reflected on the Talking HealthTech podcast:
“What we actually created was digital silos instead of paper silos and paper filing cabinets.”
The opportunity now is to connect what has already been built – and there are signs that the conditions to do that at scale are increasingly coming together.
Peter O’Halloran, Chief Digital Officer at the Australian Digital Health Agency, believes the sector has reached an important point:
“I’ve never seen so much traction as we’ve seen in the last two or three years… We’re beyond the tipping point.”
The question is how to turn that momentum into connected care at scale.
From connectivity to useful information
Simply moving more data between more systems is not the end goal.
When information remains fragmented across different systems and settings, people may repeat their story or undergo tests that have already been completed. Clinicians can spend valuable time finding information – or may make decisions without the full context available elsewhere in the health system.
Interoperability creates the foundation to change that.
For Telstra Health Chief Health and Risk Officer Dr Monica Trujillo, the value of better-connected information ultimately comes back to the limited time a clinician and person have together – and how technology can make that interaction more meaningful.
“At the end of the day, it’s that moment of care that is really important… The technology is one of those things that can really transform those five to ten minutes to make it really meaningful, so that you feel you’re in control of your health journey.”
And as artificial intelligence starts to play a greater role in healthcare, the quality and context of the information available becomes even more important.
Getting the foundations right for AI
AI is only as useful as the information underpinning it.
Data needs to be available, but it also needs to be structured, complete and understood in the right context. Without those foundations, technology risks accelerating the use of incomplete or poorly understood information rather than improving decision-making.
As Farhoud explains in the conversation, getting the data right is fundamental to getting AI right.
Interoperability is therefore about more than connecting systems. It creates part of the foundation for using emerging technologies safely and effectively across health and care.
Building for care, connected
This is the opportunity Telstra Health is addressing through Corus™, our care intelligence ecosystem designed to connect care across settings.
At its core, Corus iX™ is an interoperability foundation that is designed to bring structure and clarity to complex data across health and care settings.
Clinicians get the relevant information at the right time and it supports secure information exchange between the people and services that need it.
The aim is not connectivity for its own sake. It is to help turn fragmented information into something more useful – surfacing insight that can help support better decisions and experiences at the point of care.
Australia has significant digital health foundations in place. The opportunity now is to put them to work and make care, connected at scale.
Hear the conversation
Dr Monica Trujillo and Farhoud Salimi explore these issues further with Peter O’Halloran, Chief Digital Officer at the Australian Digital Health Agency, on the Talking HealthTech podcast recorded at HIC 2026.