Telehealth Hub development: Phase two

Project Description

In the face of COVID-19, rapid adoption of telehealth has been an essential tool in the delivery of health care services. The Digital Health Cooperative Research Centre (DHCRC) launched a Telehealth Hub in May 2020 to help clinicians, health professionals and health consumers access and deliver telehealth services in Australia more effectively. The idea for the development of the Telehealth Hub website came from the Q&A sessions and chat forum, which formed part of the hugely successful telehealth webinar series held by DHCRC in response to COVID-19, which initially ran from 24 March to 21 April and attracted 8,400+ people. These webinars featured telehealth experts and clinicians who shared their experiences and tips on getting up to speed with telehealth effectively and rapidly. Many participants (most of them members of Australia’s health community), as well as our expert presenters, shared hundreds of useful links, resources, and recommendations for materials to support their colleagues, professionals, and consumers to access and deliver telehealth services effectively.

The site was created through a collaboration between Curtin University, La Trobe University and the DHCRC. The team quickly mobilised highly skilled people to check, collate and index the crowd-sourced information and develop this website. The Telehealth Hub has been used extensively, and as of October 2020 6,100 users had engaged in 8,700 sessions with 16,300 page views. A telehealth mailing list has also been established with 7,695 subscribers. The aim of this internship project is to design a plan for the development of the next stage of the Telehealth Hub and establish a complementary online community group. This project is building on the work outlined in DHCRC-0114 – PhD scholarship top-up for Christina Tsou: Telehealth Toolkit.