Australia to make telehealth permanently available

According to a report, Australia’s health minister Greg Hunt announced that the government is making telehealth a permanent part of Australian healthcare. Online and phone consultations were introduced as a temporary measure in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. Medicare, Australia’s universal health insurance scheme, added telehealth services to the list of reimbursable services, incentivising patients to use telehealth and ensuring doctors get paid for providing remote care. Hung confirmed that since then, more than 40 million sessions had been carried out.