The inflection point we cannot afford to squander
For years, healthcare has treated connected care as a vision to agree on. That is no longer enough. The direction is clear; the challenge now is building the architecture, operating models and shared capabilities to make it work at scale.
Australia has the foundations for change, including My Health Record, maturing FHIR® standards and the National Digital Health Strategy 2023–2028. Yet care remains deeply fragmented.
Patients repeat their story at every transition point. Clinicians drown in administration. Critical data sits in silos. In a sector worth approximately $270 billion annually and serving 25 million Australians, this is not merely inefficient; it is a systemic failure of design.
With Share by Default legislation, FHIR® mandates, the Digital Health Blueprint 2023–2033, post-COVID consumer expectations and enterprise-grade AI converging, the next one to two years will be decisive.
At Telstra Health, as Australia’s largest provider of digital health solutions and services, our ambition is simple: to create a world where health insight follows the person.
And we started this work, in earnest, about two years ago.
From points solution to platform: Why the architecture had to change
Trust and honesty are prerequisites for credibility. By mid-2020’s, Telstra Health had strong, trusted products across the care continuum with MedicalDirector serving approximately 6,000 GP practices with over one billion moments of care supported; Communicare, the leading clinical solution for Aboriginal Community Controlled Healthcare Organisations, used by more than 8,000 health professionals; and platforms across social services, screening, and aged care.
Each was trusted; however, each had been built in a different era, on a different architecture, with a different data model.
Healthcare software was historically built as closed, locally hosted ecosystems with proprietary data models. Patients and clinicians still experience the health system as disconnected encounters rather than a continuous journey. No incremental upgrade could solve this. To enable connected care, we needed to move from point solutions to a unified platform.
Building to deliver
What distinguishes intent from execution is structural commitment. Telstra Health reorganised from a business-unit model into unified functional teams capable of building at scale.
We also understood that connected care is a system problem, not just a technology problem, and no single entity can solve it alone.
That is why we built Corus™: a cloud-native, interoperable care intelligence ecosystem designed to connect care across settings.
By standardising core platform services with market leaders, Salesforce for the clinical data model and agentic AI, Snowflake for governed enterprise data analytics, and Smile Digital Health for FHIR®-native interoperability, we have reduced systemic complexity.
This deliberately layered infrastructure ingests, harmonises, and distributes clinical data securely. Built once and reused everywhere, Corus™ ensures care is connected, protected, and trusted.
Putting the patient at the centre
Our mission is to realise a connected and improved digital health experience for all, where patients only need to tell their health story once.
A unified clinical data model means history, medications, results and care plans follow the patient securely across primary, specialty, aged care and community settings.
The architecture empowers Australians to participate in their own care journey, consistent with the Agency’s vision for person-centred digital health.
How Corus™ is giving clinicians back their time
Clinician burnout is driven not by a lack of caring but by overwhelming administrative overload. While early AI platforms have focused on ambient listening and summarisation, future savings will come from quality outputs driven by quality data that clinicians can trust.
Corus™ replaces isolated reports with intelligence embedded directly into clinical workflows. Powered by a governed data spine, it can surface insights at the point of care and support documentation, referrals, proactive follow-up, care gap identification and decision support.
Our position on AI is explicit: AI augments, never replaces. Clinical safety governance, explainability, bias monitoring and continuous audit need to be built in from the ground up.
From data silos to a connected nation
Our data and interoperability infrastructure are where our ambition to connect care becomes tangible. Our approach rests on a clear principle: data is ingested once, governed centrally and is served across products, partners and AI.
At the foundation sits a single longitudinal data spine powered by Snowflake: a governed enterprise intelligence foundation that delivers structured, deduplicated and clinically meaningful data to every layer above it.
Above it sits a FHIR®-native interoperability layer powered by Smile Digital Health. Instead of fragile point-to-point integrations, interoperability becomes reusable infrastructure that activates clinical signals for coordinated workflows, medication reconciliation and cross-site visibility, with consent, auditability and data quality governance embedded.
In August 2025, Telstra Health, in consortium with Smile Digital Health and Leidos Australia, was awarded the contract to modernise Australia’s My Health Record infrastructure, transitioning from a legacy system to a modern, FHIR-enabled health data infrastructure. This matters because of what it enables: the connective tissue for the national health ecosystem.
The intelligence layer then amplifies this governed data through AI embedded in workflows, supporting proactive interventions, population health analytics and enterprise benchmarking. The experience layer turns those insights into coordinated workflows clinicians want to use.
Already building: What is shipping and when
Corus™ will launch iteratively. Population Health, Care Navigation and Care Coordination capabilities are planned from the second half of 2026.
Multi-disciplinary solutions across primary care, community care, specialist care and allied health are planned from mid-2027, with aged care solutions from 2028.
The interoperability and data fabric at its core enables health organisations to participate in real-time data exchange without building that infrastructure themselves.
No customer left behind
I want to speak directly to customers who rely on our products today. Existing products will continue to be supported during the transition, and customers will access the benefits of Corus™ progressively over time.
Each phase is designed so that the customers going live, and the people in their care, are supported from day one. The platform design is guided by our External Advisory Panel, clinical and non-clinical advisors across the Australian health ecosystem.
The platform’s layered architecture includes a migration abstraction layer that decouples legacy systems from the new foundation. This means connectivity, interoperability, data feeds and analytics can arrive well before any full migration.
The obligation of scale
The question is not whether AI and platform-based connected care will reshape Australian healthcare. It will. The question is whether that transformation is led by organisations combining clinical knowledge, trusted relationships, regulatory expertise and engineering discipline.
Telstra Health’s answer is unambiguous. Being Australia’s largest digital health company is not a commercial descriptor; it is an obligation. Our portfolio already spans general practice, community care, aged care, screening and national infrastructure. Corus™ unifies it. The partnerships are now in place, the engineering is underway, and the products are shipping. The goal is a health system where every Australian receives care that is continuous, coordinated and person-centred; where clinical data flows securely across every setting; where clinicians spend their time on patients, not paperwork; and where everyone only has to tell their story once. That system is being built. Right now
