Coronavirus has meant a massive boom in telehealth — one Australian start-up was ready

In mid-March, when most of us went into isolation, Silvia Pfeiffer was running on adrenaline and minimal sleep.

The telehealth start-up she’d been working on since being hired by the CSIRO in 2012 was suddenly part of the Federal Government’s strategy in fighting COVID-19.

Dr Pfeiffer is a computer scientist and the co-founder of Coviu, a healthcare videoconferencing platform.

A day after Health Minister Greg Hunt announced telehealth would become a Medicare item, the fledging company took off.

“We went from doing 400 or 300 consultations a day to doing 25,000 consultations a day within the course of two weeks,” Dr Pfeiffer tells ABC RN’s The Money.

“We’ve probably accelerated our growth expectations from what we would do over the next five years to having done all of that within two weeks.”

The number of medical practices using the software went from about 400 practices to 12,000 in three months.

The company rushed to employ and train more staff to help health professionals use the new subscription-based system.

Unlike platforms like Zoom and Skype, Coviu doesn’t require the user to install any software.

“You basically just click on a link in a web browser and you can set up a video call, Dr Pfeiffer says.

“When you come in as a patient, it’s a bit like going to a doctor’s office. The practice sees that you’re waiting and can start triaging you, can take your Medicare details, put you back on hold until the clinician is ready for you.”

The program also has specific artificial intelligence tools.

For example, physiotherapists using Coviu are able to measure a patients’ range of movement with a drawing tool, applied to the patients’ arm or leg as they appear in the video.

Telehealth helps patients avoid the travel and time required to attend a GP clinic, and opens up access to people in rural areas.

Dr Pfeiffer predicts that in the future, digital devices to measure blood pressure or temperature “will be in everybody’s hands, in their homes”.

“And you’ll be able to do some of these diagnostics that the clinicians are doing in their offices also from home.”

Adapting in real time

Coviu’s success is part of a push by the CSIRO’s innovation fund, Main Sequence Ventures (MSeq), to invest in companies translating research into global-scale businesses.

MSeq is Coviu’s main investor.

It was launched by former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull in 2016 to commercialise early stage innovations from CSIRO, universities and other publicly funded research bodies.

“We have caused the formation of 25 companies in that time,” says Phil Morle, a partner at the venture capital fund.

“Across those 25 companies, there are already 400 jobs and they are all hiring like crazy, even right now.

“They’re making companies which they believe are going to have decades of runway in front of them. They’re the jobs of the future.”

Dr Pfeiffer says MSeq took a stake in Coviu early on, when few other companies believed that there would be a need for a software platform for telehealth.

In the midst of a pandemic, Mr Morle is optimistic about the other Australian start-ups in which the fund has a stake.

They range from plant-based food products, to applications for cyber security, healthcare, and space.

“There’s very real-time adapting happening. Anything could happen in the weeks and months to come,” he says.

Mr Morle hopes to help build new industries in Australia, and help create “companies that are going to live for the next decades to come”.

‘There are some enormous companies coming out of this with some incredibly unique ideas, which have been born here in Australia,” he says.

‘Healthcare has completely changed’

Since July 20, most patients have needed an existing relationship with their GP to access Medicare-subsidised telehealth.

The Federal Government has said telehealth will remain in place until September 30. After that, its future is unclear.

But a spokesperson for the Health Minister has said Mr Hunt “intends for telehealth to be a positive legacy of this crisis”, and Regional Health Minister Mark Coulton has said there’s “no way we’re going back to having no telehealth”.

It’s a statement echoed by Dr Pfeiffer.

“The healthcare industry has completely changed in the last six months,” she says.

“We will never see telehealth go away again.”