Level 4, 477 Pitt Street
Sydney NSW 2000
P. 02 9263 9000
www.healthdirect.gov.au
Standing Committee on Health, Aged Care and Disability
House of Representatives, Parliament of Australia.
1 October 2025
Re: Inquiry into the Thriving Kids Initiative
Healthdirect Australia’s submission to this Inquiry relates to these areas in the terms of reference:
- Examine evidence-based information and resources that could assist parents identify if their child has mild to moderate development delay and support parents to provide support to these children; and
- Identify mechanisms that would allow a seamless transition through mainstream systems for all children with mild to moderate support needs.
Organisational background and services to Australians
Healthdirect Australia was established in 2006 by Australian governments to provide a national call centre that Australians could ring for health information, advice and triage. At the time, each State and Territory had its own call centre; Healthdirect was created to provide a centralised service to be established once to improve clinical consistency, reduce duplication, and allow jurisdictions to benefit from national economies of scale.
Healthdirect was set up as a Company under the Corporations Act, and every State, Territory and the Commonwealth Government are equal shareholders. Healthdirect is only permitted to provide services to its government funders.
Over the past 20 years, Healthdirect has transitioned from a call centre to a national virtual service providing information, advice and navigation; with 15 digital interactions for every one phone interaction with Australians. Our most popular content is available in 16 languages and we offer translators on our phone lines through the government’s Translator Interpreter Service.
In addition to the well known nurse triage service, Healthdirect supports Australians access services through the My Aged Care program, and provides focussed advice for mental health, pregnancy birth and babies, and short term services such as during floods or cyclones. Healthdirect operated the COVID Helpline and vaccine eligibility and access service during COVID, surging to around 130 million annual interactions with Australians. Demand has since tapered back to around 70 million annual interactions since the end of COVID.
Recent government investment in Healthdirect assets
In 2022, governments invested $10.9 million in Healthdirect to build a more contemporary contact centre platform using the latest technology, highly secure cloud services, AI probabilistic inference tools, as well as process improvements to the commercial model, clinical and service governance, complaints processes, quality assessment and audit, and e-learning based training and compliance. The return on this investment was completed in 26 months, whereby savings in operating expenses exceeded the value of the initial investment. In addition to cost savings, Healthdirect assets now enable pathways to be built quickly and cheaply to new healthcare services as they are launched, and with data stored and managed in-house, Healthdirect provides near real time analytics and insights on consumer needs and health system. The systems and data are fully housed in secure cloud environments in Australia.
In 2025, the Commonwealth announced further investment of around $180 million to uplift the Healthdirect technology and service platform, and to fund expected increases in demand by rebranding the service to 1800MEDICARE and promoting it through a national campaign. This work will improve the resilience of the technology platform, replace the content management system for self care advice, improve consumer experience and seamless interactions across phone and digital channels, and continue implementing AI to reduce administrative tasks for nurse and GP workforce.
Together, these investments are building out the ‘virtual front door’ vision for healthcare, whereby consumers access a single entry point to determine how to self care, understand when they should seek healthcare services, and if so, how to find and book those services. Healthdirect is methodically rolling disparate health phone services into this ‘virtual front door’, starting with legacy COVID services, and now mental health phone services across NSW. This consolidation not only makes it easier for consumers to make the right initial touchpoint; it also reduces fragmentation and duplication across services in a complex public/private, State/Federal system.
Potential use of Healthdirect assets for Thriving Kids
The Government’s announcement to change the way children with developmental delays are identified and supported to access services will require a mechanism to enable families to know when to seek a diagnosis and to find services suitable for their children. General practitioners, allied health and other professionals will no doubt play a core role in this process.
Healthdirect’s assets could be used to assist parents determine if they should seek advice from a healthcare professional on potential developmental delays, and provide digital and phone assistance to access these services, 24/7 and in the language of their choice. Tis is the core function of our triage and advice service, which helps consumers make informed decisions about when to seek care and how to book it.
If a child is assessed as being suitable and eligible for services, Healthdirect could again assist families find and book appropriate virtual or face to face services. Using the existing National Health Services Directory which has over 120,000 services listed, new categories of services could be included and pathways created from care plans. These digital assets are currently accessible through the Commonwealth My Health App and we are integrating with digital systems in the health sector through interoperable data exchange standards.
Furthermore, Healthdirect operates a legacy Pregnancy, Birth and Babies helpline which offers phone based advice from maternal health nurses. This could be repurposed to better reflect contemporary expectations from consumers. It could form an initial step in an integrated service for Australians planning to start a family, moving through the phases of conception and birth, and into early childhood development – including guidance on expected development and how to respond to perceived variations. Integrating this information and advice service with the My Health Record which includes immunisation records would start to provide a holistic record and service experience for families.
We would be happy to discuss how Healthdirect’s assets and services could be leveraged to support the Government’s implementation of the Thriving Kids initiative. Thank you again for the opportunity to contribute to your consultation, and for undertaking this important work.
Yours sincerely,
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Bettina McMahon Chief Executive Officer Healthdirect Australia