HealthKit co-founder Alison Hardacre says the partnership with Coviu allows HealthKit’s practitioners to add telehealth services to their existing service offering by providing online video consultation capability.

"Telehealth is the next major trend in healthcare globally. The American Medical Association recently released their first guidelines for telehealth which further legitimise and endorse the use of telehealth in mainstream healthcare.” Hardacre says.

The HealthKit cloud-based platform combines practice management software for private practitioners (medical specialists, GPs, and allied health) with an integrated directory and portal for patients to track and manage their health.

Coviu launched its WebRTC-based video platform in November 2015, which allows for in-browser video conferencing and exchange of documents and images such as medical imaging, without the need to use an external program or download an app such as Skype.

Coviu project director and co-founder Dr Silvia Pfeiffer said Coviu platform is fully encrypted end-to-end, “making it one of the most secure video conferencing technologies in the world”.

“Coviu’s goal is to enable all primary and allied health practitioners in Australia to offer video consultation functionality,” Dr Pfeiffer says.

“To make video consultations part of workflows, we made it simple for our partners to integrate our technology into their systems. Our user interface has a big focus on usability to make it really accessible to practitioners and the broader public.”

Online consultations are now available for HealthKit’s practitioners.