Is healthcare becoming easier to access but harder to navigate?

Australians have never had more ways to access healthcare.

Alongside general practice, patients can now seek care through telehealth, online prescribing services, community pharmacies, Medicare Urgent Care Clinics, My Health Record, Medicare Mental Health services and, more recently, 1800MEDICARE, the Australian Government’s new 24-hour health advice service.

For patients, greater choice has undoubtedly improved access. For healthcare leaders, however, it has introduced a different challenge.

The question is no longer simply whether patients can access care. It is whether they can successfully navigate an increasingly fragmented healthcare system.

More doors, but no clearer pathway

For decades, improving access has been a central focus of Australian healthcare policy. New models of care have reduced barriers, expanded after-hours support and given patients more options than ever before.

Yet every new entry point also creates another transition between providers, another handover and another opportunity for information to be lost.

Chris Boyd-Skinner, Incoming CEO of the Digital Health Standards Council of Australasia believes the challenge is no longer getting patients into the system.

“We’ve simultaneously made it easier to get into the system and harder to get through it.”

Boyd-Skinner says the growing number of services has created a healthcare environment where patients often become responsible for connecting their own care.

“A patient can now reach care through telehealth, an online prescribing service, an urgent care clinic, a symptom-checker app, their GP or the emergency department. Multiple ways in, but very few options that talk to each other.”

When information does not move with the patient, continuity of care can quickly become fragmented. Patients may receive appropriate advice from individual providers, but without a coordinated view of their healthcare journey, inconsistencies can emerge and important clinical context can be missed.

As Boyd-Skinner explains, “Someone’s been told three different things by three services in a fortnight, each reasonable on its own, but no one holds the full picture except the patient.”

He believes older Australians and people living with chronic conditions are often those most affected by this fragmentation.

Technology alone won’t solve the problem

Digital health is frequently presented as the solution to healthcare complexity. While technology has enormous potential to improve access and efficiency, Boyd-Skinner argues that digital tools only create value when they improve coordination rather than simply adding another point of entry.

“Good health tech can just as easily become another door,” he says.

Technology should help patients move through the system more effectively by allowing information to follow them, directing them to the most appropriate level of care and identifying when multiple providers are managing the same patient.

Without those capabilities, digital solutions risk increasing complexity rather than reducing it.

“What decides which direction things go isn’t how technically clever the tool is – it’s whether it shares information and whether anyone has checked that it actually works.”

The growing use of artificial intelligence and digital decision-support tools also places greater emphasis on validation and clinical governance.

As more organisations adopt emerging technologies, healthcare leaders must ensure new systems improve patient outcomes while maintaining accountability for the decisions they influence.

The next leadership challenge is coordination

For healthcare leaders, improving access is no longer enough. The next challenge is ensuring patients experience healthcare as one connected journey rather than a series of disconnected encounters.

Boyd-Skinner believes this requires organisations to think beyond implementing new platforms and instead focus on ownership, governance and accountability. As he puts it, “More capability without anyone owning the whole patient journey just gives you complexity with a nicer interface.”

Rather than asking what technology to invest in next, he believes leaders should first ask, “Who is accountable for this patient’s experience across all of it, not their slice of it?” 

As artificial intelligence and digital health tools become increasingly embedded in clinical care, that accountability must extend beyond implementation to governance. Boyd-Skinner warns that organisations also need to consider, “And when there’s AI or a digital tool in the decision, who answers for it when it gets something wrong? If you can’t answer the second one, you don’t have strong governance. You have a liability you haven’t yet addressed.”

Bottom line

Australia’s healthcare system is becoming more accessible than ever before, but greater access does not automatically translate into a better patient experience.

As services continue to expand, the organisations that deliver the greatest value may not be those that create the next point of access, but those that make the entire patient journey easier to navigate.

For healthcare leaders, the future challenge is not simply opening more doors. It is ensuring every door leads patients through a connected, coordinated and accountable system.