Telstra Health has today unveiled its new cloud native, standards-based and interoperable care intelligence ecosystem Corus, which it says is designed to “connect care across settings.”
Launching the platform at the Digital Health Festival in Melbourne, Telstra Health Chief Health and Risk Officer Dr Monica Trujillo said the development of Corus was guided by Telstra Health’s External Advisory Panel – including clinical and non-clinical advisors from across the Australian health ecosystem.
“True, connected care isn’t designed in a vacuum. Developed alongside frontline clinicians who live the challenges of fragmented systems, Corus represents a future where solutions work more effectively around the person. We aren’t just building technology – we’re building that future with the people who are delivering care every day.”
Telstra Health’s Managing Director Elizabeth Koff said Corus marked “the first visible outcome” of the company’s “multi-year modernisation,” underway since late 2024.
She said the platform had been designed and built to global interoperability standards, “informed by real-world requirements across geographies and jurisdictions.”
“Health and care services are managing unprecedented volumes of data on systems never designed for today’s complexity. Despite significant investment, care remains fragmented and the gap between effort and impact continues to widen.
“Our ambition is simple and human: to create a world where health insight follows the person. This sits at the heart of our modernisation strategy, shaping how we invest, innovate, and partner to deliver transformative change across the Australian healthcare landscape and beyond.”
Built with clinical safety, strong cybersecurity, privacy and consent frameworks, Corus is designed to deliver “shared capabilities across programs and care settings.”
DATA SPINE
Corus is underpinned by its interoperability and data exchange layer, Corus iX – an enterprise ‘data spine’ that enables reporting, predictive insights, AI clinical summaries and population health tools.
The next generation of Telstra Health’s Health Information Exchange (HIE), Corus iX is built on Smile OmniVera HDP, a FHIR native health data platform. It provides a governed, standards based foundation for sharing information securely and in near real time across hospitals, primary care, aged care, community services, diagnostics, pharmacy and government programs.
Corus iX allows reusable, modular interoperability services that can be deployed across programs and jurisdictions, with the aim of reducing duplication, improving consistency and improving scaled delivery of connected services including eRequesting, Smart Referrals and eResults.
KEY FEATURES
Initial capabilities that will be available from the second half of 2026 include Population Health, Care Navigation and Care Coordination.
Population Health supports multiple population health and social services, while Care Navigation is promoted as “among the first AI- enabled, omnichannel contact-centres,” including a localised service directory. Care Coordination is designed to deliver ongoing coordination across multiple services over weeks or months.
Dr Trujillo said health was “deeply personal, yet our systems make care feel disconnected.”
“Patients and their families should not have to retell their stories at their toughest moments, and clinicians should not be forced to make critical decisions without the full picture. It can impact the quality and safety of care. With Corus, we aim to close the information gap by equipping clinicians with more connected, meaningful insights, helping them deliver safer, more seamless care that is built for a modern world.”
Multidisciplinary solutions, including primary care, community care, specialist care and allied health would be available on Corus from mid-2027 – with Aged Care solutions available from 2028.
Additionally, AI-powered summaries and intuitive workflows would be gradually added to existing Aged Care and Primary Care environments, with the aim of “moving them closer to the Corus vision.”
DELIBERATE SHIFT
Telstra Health Chief Technology Officer Farhoud Salimi said Corus also represented a deliberate shift in how Telstra Health delivered digital health solutions – a “cloud native, interoperable, care intelligence ecosystem, supported by market leading providers to deliver improved outcomes for our community.“
“Health and care systems have more data, yet less ability to bring it together and make good use of it. We are addressing this with Corus, building a shared digital capability and then reusing it many times across multiple care systems,” Mr Salimi said.
“This means reducing duplication while helping customers innovate faster, creating a more connected view across the care journey.”
He noted Corus brought together “trusted data, FHIR-native interoperability, AI-enabled intelligence and workflow-embedded experiences.“
“If connected care were purely a technology problem, we probably would have solved it by now. It’s not. It’s a system problem, and no single entity can solve that alone. By working with market-leading providers like Salesforce, Snowflake and Smile Digital Health, we are standardising core platform services, reducing complexity and thereby risk, while scaling solutions faster and with confidence. All delivered without disrupting the systems or solutions our customers rely on today,” Mr Salimi said.
A select group of eligible customers would be invited by Telstra Health to experience Corus ahead of the 2027 general release. Customers can also register interest.
In a statement, the company said that “behind every person there’s a health story shaped by years of conversations, diagnoses and decisions. While that story belongs to them, they should not have to that the burden of repeating it at every step of their care journey.
However, this is the challenge facing modern healthcare: more information is available than ever before, yet clinicians and care teams have less time to make sense of it.”
“Today, approximately 30 per cent of the world’s data volume is generated by the healthcare industry, and this is growing at a rate of 63 per cent annually. The shift to a more interoperable, AI-enabled health system is no longer aspirational; it is essential, and Telstra Health believes it has a responsibility to help lead that shift.”
PARTNER ECOSYSTEM
Corus has been built with key market providers with the aim of meeting the “complexity of national and statewide health programs,” including Salesforce, which provides the core clinical data model and agentic AI capabilities to deliver a flexible foundation that Telstra Health can configure and extend as part of the broader platform
Meanwhile, Snowflake delivers the governed enterprise data foundation, while Smile Digital Health provides a FHIR-native, real-time interoperability engine for real time standards-based data exchange
Additionally, MuleSoft, Salesforce’s technology platform integrator, acts as the platform’s secure integration front door, enabling access through a single FHIR based connection
The “deliberately layered,” cloud-native architecture is designed to ensure that Telstra Health can “innovate faster and with confidence.”
The company said it also lays the foundation “for what comes next -deeper analytics and agentic AI that support clinicians, reduce burden, and allow customers to scale safely within regulatory and ethical expectations.”
