"As we now move forward post-pandemic (hopefully), it seems clear that virtual care will remain a core aspect of healthcare in Australia.

[...] Telehealth is not going away. According to Solve-Care CEO, “India has the potential to have one of the highest users of telehealth services in the world, making it a natural choice for [us] to make India a focus and important market.”

But moving forward we need a better understanding of how virtual health has evolved in the last two years, and to explore ways to make it inclusive and equitable.

To this end, the Nossal Institute for Global Health (University of Melbourne) along with partners including the George Institute, Adelaide University and Infosys have been funded by the Australia India Council to expand accessible virtual care in India and Australia. The project is called VirtuCare.

VirtuCare works with the health and ICT industry, government and healthcare providers, and most importantly people with disability, to co-design a model of care that will address health and rehabilitation needs of people with disability – those who were often excluded in the recent rapid expansion of telehealth. Once we get the model right, we aim to expand the initiative to the national disability and health systems. To achieve this, we partner with e-Sanjiveeni, the government of India’s telehealth platform, to document learning from use of telehealth during the pandemic and to inform future inclusive telehealth models."

Nathan Grills

Read more about the VirtuCare project here!

Within the context of the project, the VirtuCare team aims to codesign a platform and content for supporting CBID workers. In such a process, the team would work with trainees at 1-2 sites in India to determine what these trainees actually need and would be the best platform to deliver this. This will also be informed by the literature review and survey that aims to understand the usage of virtual care (barriers and enablers) for people with disability.

Enablement's RehApp, which is designed to help equip CBID workers could be used as a prototype for CBID trainees to start exploring, discussing, and designing a virtual healthcare platform to support them in delivering care to people with disability.