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Authored by Farhoud Salimi, Chief Technology Officer of Telstra Health.
Australia’s health system has made significant strides toward connected care. In 2025, this momentum continued with another year of accelerated transformation across Australian healthcare.
With over 25 million Australians relying on healthcare services and the sector worth approximately $270 billion annually, digital health adoption continued to surge as providers embraced virtual care, AI-driven diagnostics, and integrated data platforms to improve patient outcomes.
Cybersecurity also surged to the top of the executive agenda, with hospitals and health networks investing heavily to protect sensitive patient data amid growing security threats.
In 2026, the differentiator won’t be the latest buzzwords – or even access to the latest AI platforms. Instead, it will be the engineering discipline that turns vision into dependable, secure, and interoperable digital health services at scale – systems that patients, clinicians, and health organisations can trust.
It will also be the year we truly codify and unify the digital foundations that help lessen the burden of disconnected, fragmented systems, supporting clinicians to focus on their patients.
Against this backdrop, several key digital health IT trends are emerging that will shape how these ambitions translate into practical, scalable solutions for clinicians and patients alike.
Secure-by design becomes the baseline
Healthcare’s attack surface continues to expand as data flows across hospitals, primary care, aged care, and community services. Security can no longer be bolted on after the fact; it must be architected into every layer – identity, data, application, and integration.
In practice, that means Zero Trust access patterns, privileged identity management, tamper-evident audit trails, secure software supply chains (including Software Bill of Materials), and continuous control monitoring across on-premises and cloud.
Procurement and regulators will demand demonstrable secure engineering, elevating cybersecurity from a technical checkbox to a core element of clinical governance and patient trust.
Interoperability that performs (not just complies)
While the vision of “one patient, one story” remains a long-term goal, with national connected care targets set to be realised by 2030 as part of the National Healthcare Interoperability Plan and National Digital Health Strategy 2023-2028’s connected care targets, momentum is building.
Health providers will measure interoperability not only by conformance but by throughput, reliability, and data quality, and they are now beginning to demonstrate what’s possible.
St Vincent’s Health Australia’s pledge to move half of its services online and into patients’ homes by 2030 – freeing hospital space for surgery and intensive care – shows how connected data can improve outcomes and reduce pressure on hospitals.
These early proof points signal a broader shift – hospitals, primary care, aged care and community services are starting to integrate information more effectively, supported by stronger national policies, maturing digital infrastructure and growing investment in secure data sharing.
Underpinning all of this is trust – trust in the integrity and provenance of health information, trust in the security of exchange systems, and trust that information will be used appropriately to improve care.
Clinical governance recast for a digital, AI-enabled system
As digitisation accelerates, governance cannot live in PDFs and committees alone.
In 2026, we expect clinical governance to be more widely recognised as the foundation of safe, resilient and effective digital health systems, moving well beyond compliance. As AI, interoperability and connected care mature, robust governance models will be essential for transparency, accountability and public trust.
Integration of clinical quality registries into the broader digital health ecosystem, as outlined in the National Digital Health Strategy, will lay the foundations for real-time benchmarking, outcomes analysis and system-wide quality improvement. Health services will increasingly be measured not only on traditional governance metrics but also on digitally enabled quality indicators.
Governance frameworks, like Telstra Health’s SAFER Performance Reporting and integrated Clinical Operating Models, will give clinical leaders real-time visibility into safety, performance, and risk across digital platforms.
Governance will also be embedded directly into the design of technology itself, ensuring that AI tools and interoperable platforms are safe, privacy-protected and continuously monitored. This will allow clinicians to identify risks early, guide improvement initiatives, and maintain public trust in an increasingly digital health ecosystem.
Board-level KPIs will include digitally enabled quality measures: data completeness, reconciliation rates, alerting accuracy, and time-to-resolution for safety events.
The result: governance that is proactive, measurable, and inseparable from delivery.
Enterprise AI platforms enter healthcare – responsibility at scale
January 2026 marked a watershed moment: major AI companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic, launched enterprise-grade healthcare platforms, signalling that general-purpose AI has arrived in clinical settings.
These platforms bring HIPAA-ready infrastructure, integration with medical databases and coding systems, and capabilities extending beyond consumer chatbots to support clinical documentation and regulatory workflows. With $3.7 billion invested in AI technologies in 2025 and the TGA’s ongoing consultations on AI medical device regulation through 2025-2026, the foundation is being laid for responsible adoption at scale.
AI-enabled diagnostics are improving early detection rates by 64% (AIHW) and expanding access for rural and remote Australians, with more than 1.2 million people already using AI-supported telehealth.
When embedded into interoperable platforms, AI will give clinicians a unified, real-time view of the patient journey without manual effort.
However, technology is not a replacement for clinical expertise. Success will depend on clinician oversight, trust, governance, and ethical AI use. Secure-by-design architectures will pair predictive models with guardrails – role-based permissions, auditability, and override pathways, to ensure that AI augments rather than replaces clinical judgment.
Looking forward: Empowering Australians through connected care
Digital health’s true power lies in creating a connected ecosystem where Australians never have to tell their story twice. Interoperable platforms, AI-driven insights, and secure, person-centred workflows will strengthen safety, continuity, and trust.
Achieving this will require disciplined engineering and collaboration across policymakers, clinicians, technologists, and communities to build a proactive, coordinated model of care that improves lives.
Discover more about Telstra Health: https://www.telstrahealth.com/