PhD scholarship top-up for Christina Tsou: Telehealth toolkit

Start Date

29 June 2020

End Date

27 April 2021

Project Participants

Curtin University, WA Country Health Services (WACHS)

Status: Completed

Tags: economic evaluation, emergency care, hospital, regional rural remote health, stroke, telehealth, virtual care, workforce

Opportunity 

Telehealth offers an important opportunity to improve access to healthcare, particularly for Australians living in rural and remote communities. Realising that opportunity requires more than deploying technology. Health services also need the clinical capability, workforce readiness, processes and implementation strategies that allow telehealth to become part of routine care.  

DHCRC supported the completion of a PhD program that investigated these implementation challenges and aimed to better understand the capabilities that are needed for more effective and sustainable telehealth delivery.  

Project Objectives  

The project aimed to identify the capabilities needed to implement best practice telehealth, investigate barriers and enablers to adoption, understand changing workforce requirements, and strengthen evidence about telehealth effectiveness and cost-effectiveness. 

A longer-term objective was to improve the outcomes of digital health investments in telehealth by developing and translating evidence into practical use for health services and policymakers with a telehealth toolkit. 

The research established an implementation and evaluation framework, developed the WA TeleStroke Service economic evaluation, and completed key case study data collection. The WA TeleStroke work extended evaluation beyond technology adoption to consider clinical effectiveness, functional outcomes, health system costs, and factors influencing cost-effectiveness. 

This work contributes to Australia’s capability to make more evidence-based decisions about telehealth design, implementation and investment. For rural and remote health services, the research provides a stronger foundation for understanding how access to specialist expertise through telehealth can be integrated into real-world clinical pathways. For policymakers and the digital health sector, it demonstrates the importance of evaluating digital health initiatives through the combined lenses of clinical outcomes, economics, workforce and implementation.

Integrity, Excellence,
Teamwork and Authenticity

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